top of page
"I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Books quotes

"What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so."

"I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers."

"Even a book with completely empty pages will change you because you will start thinking about the reason behind this emptiness and once you enter the thinking territory it means that you entered a territory of change!"

"Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic."

"There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books."
Explore more quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

"That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all."

"You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that."

"I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself."

"My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth."

"Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer."

"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page."

"I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity."
bottom of page