Novelist Quotes

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me.

I don't have any style.

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

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.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

I am against the notion of style in itself.

I am a writer of fragments.

For me, words are just words, nothing else.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog.

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.