top of page
.png){kind=small}
"American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
Explore more quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
"I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship."
"There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio."
"I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me."
"I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels."
"I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me."
"The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters."
"I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself."
"It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down."
bottom of page