Daily Inspiration Quote by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

A novelist insisting, "I don't have any style" is less confession than a trap door. Coming from Guillermo Cabrera Infante, it reads like a sly act of self-erasure that only draws more attention to the fingerprints. Style is the one thing a writer can never credibly renounce; even refusal becomes a pose, and poses are made of style.

The line works because it performs the kind of anti-authority gesture Cabrera Infante’s career is steeped in. A Cuban writer shaped by revolution, censorship, and exile, he understood how quickly language gets conscripted: by the state, by movements, by earnestness itself. Saying he has no style is a way of dodging the uniforms. It suggests a suspicion of the “serious writer” identity, the idea that literature must arrive with a sealed aesthetic doctrine and a moral mission.

There’s also a practical subtext: his real “style” is play, speed, and an obsession with voice. Cabrera Infante built books out of talk, jokes, puns, cinematic cuts, high-low collisions. Declaring style absent is a wink at the reader: if you’re looking for a tasteful signature, you’re already missing the point. The signature is precisely the refusal to be pinned down.

In Latin American letters, where “style” can mean the prestige of the canonical boom novel or the exoticism publishers expect, the statement is also a rejection of being packaged. It’s a way of insisting that language remains a moving target - unruly, personal, and therefore harder to police.