Wit & Attitude Quote by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Writing, Cabrera Infante reminds you, is less a serenade to “the reader” than a fistfight with inanimate objects. The line is funny in its refusal to romanticize the craft: words aren’t vessels of inspiration, they’re “very stubborn things.” That adjective does a lot of work. It implies not just difficulty but agency, as if language has its own will, its own resistance to being marshaled into meaning. The blank page becomes an adversary, the pen/typewriter a complicit weapon that can jam, slip, betray.

The specific intent is to puncture a pious myth: that writers are always performing, always catering, always aware of an audience. He flips it. In the heat of composition, the writer forgets the reader because survival becomes the priority. That’s the subtext of “just in the middle” - not the beginning, not the end, but the messy, ongoing present tense where ego, doubt, and syntax collide. The throwaway profanity (“the damn thing”) isn’t decoration; it locates art in irritation, in the bodily reality of making.

Context matters: Cabrera Infante, a Cuban novelist marked by exile and linguistic play, understood language as both home and battleground. For a writer whose work depends on puns, cadence, and the friction of speech, “reader” is necessarily secondary to the immediate problem of getting the sentence to behave. Paradoxically, that’s why the reader wins: not through pandering, but through the writer’s uncompromising attention to the stubbornness of words themselves.