"I think all writing is done through memory"
About this Quote
A novelist doesn’t “invent” so much as he raids the mind’s archive, and Cabrera Infante is blunt about the burglary. “I think all writing is done through memory” is a claim with attitude: it demotes inspiration and promotes recollection, with all its distortions. Memory here isn’t a filing cabinet; it’s a lens that bends time, edits scenes, swaps out facts for feeling. The line works because it makes writing sound less like creation ex nihilo and more like translation: lived experience (or absorbed culture) rendered into language under the pressure of longing, guilt, nostalgia, and revision.
Coming from Cabrera Infante, the subtext is political as well as aesthetic. Exile turns memory into both refuge and weapon. When you’ve lost a country, you reconstruct it sentence by sentence, but the reconstruction is never neutral; it’s an argument about what was real, what was stolen, and what must be preserved. His work is famously saturated with Havana’s talk, jokes, music, and verbal sparkle - a reminder that memory isn’t only personal trauma or family lore. It’s idiom, rhythm, the street-level soundtrack of a place.
The intent, then, is to expose the supposed purity of “imagination” as a myth. Even fantasy borrows its raw materials from what the writer has seen, heard, misheard, desired. Cabrera Infante also slyly implicates the reader: we experience stories through our own memory, matching a writer’s reconstructed world to the private one we carry around, patched together from fragments and need.
Coming from Cabrera Infante, the subtext is political as well as aesthetic. Exile turns memory into both refuge and weapon. When you’ve lost a country, you reconstruct it sentence by sentence, but the reconstruction is never neutral; it’s an argument about what was real, what was stolen, and what must be preserved. His work is famously saturated with Havana’s talk, jokes, music, and verbal sparkle - a reminder that memory isn’t only personal trauma or family lore. It’s idiom, rhythm, the street-level soundtrack of a place.
The intent, then, is to expose the supposed purity of “imagination” as a myth. Even fantasy borrows its raw materials from what the writer has seen, heard, misheard, desired. Cabrera Infante also slyly implicates the reader: we experience stories through our own memory, matching a writer’s reconstructed world to the private one we carry around, patched together from fragments and need.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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