Art & Creativity Quote by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Cabrera Infante is quietly detonating the most pious assumption of the realist novel: that fiction’s job is to manufacture “people” who feel as rounded as your neighbors. His shrug at “characters” isn’t a lack of craft; it’s a declaration of allegiance. The real protagonist, he implies, is language itself, and “character” is often just the costume we make words wear to seem respectable.

The intent is polemical, aimed at the workshop catechism that treats character psychology as the engine of meaning. Cabrera Infante flips the hierarchy. Words don’t serve characters; characters are convenient ventriloquist dummies for verbal music, joke structure, rhythm, slang, punning, and the seductive lies of style. That’s why the line “I write with words, that is all” lands with both humility and arrogance: humility because he reduces the novelist’s job to the basic material; arrogance because he’s insisting the basic material is sufficient to carry the whole art form.

The subtext is also political and diasporic. A Cuban writer shaped by Havana’s soundscape and later exile, Cabrera Infante knew that identity can be unstable, surveilled, rewritten. “This or that character” suggests interchangeability: what matters is not the stable self but the voice, the register, the verbal camouflage. In that light, the quote reads as a defense of literary freedom against doctrinaire storytelling - and against any regime, aesthetic or governmental, that demands coherent “characters” as proof of moral legibility.