"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"
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Cabrera Infante makes the writer sound less like a polished career and more like a nocturnal condition: an existence lived in the margins, half-lit, half-licensed. The sly jab at the “terribly exquisite” writer is doing real work. He’s puncturing the self-myth of literary refinement, suggesting that the truly “exquisite” are the ones most invested in looking respectable. Everyone else writes from a different posture: not heroic rebellion, not bourgeois compliance, but the twitchy in-between where you’re always borrowing from both worlds.
“Live by night” isn’t just romantic bohemia. Night is when surveillance thins and masks loosen; it’s also when the city becomes legible as appetite, risk, and improvisation. Cabrera Infante frames writing as a practice that depends on that loosened atmosphere, because the writer’s job is to notice what daytime society edits out. The phrase “moving between delinquency and conformity” captures the writer’s permanent double-agent status: you steal material (people’s talk, private scenes, the grit of taboo), then you launder it into sentences that can pass in public.
Context matters: Cabrera Infante’s career was shaped by Cuba’s revolution, censorship, exile, and the pressure to choose sides. In that light, “outside society” reads less like chic alienation and more like a survival stance. The writer isn’t above the crowd; he’s adjacent to it, listening, testing boundaries, and refusing the comfort of a single, obedient identity.
“Live by night” isn’t just romantic bohemia. Night is when surveillance thins and masks loosen; it’s also when the city becomes legible as appetite, risk, and improvisation. Cabrera Infante frames writing as a practice that depends on that loosened atmosphere, because the writer’s job is to notice what daytime society edits out. The phrase “moving between delinquency and conformity” captures the writer’s permanent double-agent status: you steal material (people’s talk, private scenes, the grit of taboo), then you launder it into sentences that can pass in public.
Context matters: Cabrera Infante’s career was shaped by Cuba’s revolution, censorship, exile, and the pressure to choose sides. In that light, “outside society” reads less like chic alienation and more like a survival stance. The writer isn’t above the crowd; he’s adjacent to it, listening, testing boundaries, and refusing the comfort of a single, obedient identity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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