"But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that"
About this Quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante rejects the comforting fiction of writing to please. He stakes out a proud solitude: the work must answer only to the demands of language, form, and the writer’s stubborn inner ear. Coming from a Cuban exile who made Havana slang sing on the page and twisted Spanish into jazz, the claim doubles as an aesthetic credo. If he had a reader in mind, his puns, cascades of allusion, and cinematic cuts might have been sanded into clarity. He preferred risk: to chase the sentence that surprises even its author, to let sound and rhythm lead where convention would not.
The provocation lies in the phrase true writer. He draws a border between art and accommodation, as if imagining a reader were already a kind of compromise with the market, the prize committee, or the timeline of a magazine serial. The Latin American Boom, with which he is often grouped, thrived on that refusal to flatter; think of Joyce via Cortazar, a lineage where difficulty is a form of respect for intelligence and a testament to freedom. Cabrera Infante’s work exemplifies this: it recruits the reader not by courting but by inviting eavesdropping on a private game with language.
There is a paradox. The writer who pretends the reader is absent often creates, indirectly, a more active reader. The text becomes a challenge that asks for patience, play, and rereading. Many writers acknowledge a two-stage process: drafts without witnesses, revisions with hospitality. Cabrera Infante pushes the first stage to an absolute, but his fierce craft shows he understood the second. His sentences beckon even as they refuse to explain themselves. The stance is less contempt for readership than faith that authenticity will find its audience. To write without a reader in mind is, for him, to trust that language, pursued to its limits, becomes its own beacon.
The provocation lies in the phrase true writer. He draws a border between art and accommodation, as if imagining a reader were already a kind of compromise with the market, the prize committee, or the timeline of a magazine serial. The Latin American Boom, with which he is often grouped, thrived on that refusal to flatter; think of Joyce via Cortazar, a lineage where difficulty is a form of respect for intelligence and a testament to freedom. Cabrera Infante’s work exemplifies this: it recruits the reader not by courting but by inviting eavesdropping on a private game with language.
There is a paradox. The writer who pretends the reader is absent often creates, indirectly, a more active reader. The text becomes a challenge that asks for patience, play, and rereading. Many writers acknowledge a two-stage process: drafts without witnesses, revisions with hospitality. Cabrera Infante pushes the first stage to an absolute, but his fierce craft shows he understood the second. His sentences beckon even as they refuse to explain themselves. The stance is less contempt for readership than faith that authenticity will find its audience. To write without a reader in mind is, for him, to trust that language, pursued to its limits, becomes its own beacon.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Guillermo
Add to List
