Gustavo Perez Firmat Quotes

#1. Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#2. There's a Cuban saying: Bicho malo nunca muere. Loose translation: The good die young but the wicked live forever. It seems to apply to Fidel. I hope it applies to me.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#3. The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#4. I say that being a smart writer doesn't make you a good writer. There's obviously a difference between talent and intelligence. And it may be that at some point intelligence begins to impinge on talent, or talent on intelligence.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#5. I am a loner by nature, and then I'm a writer, which makes me twice a loner.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#6. For me the path to the literary goes through the non - literary. For this reason it surprises me that I am a writer, or that people speak of me as a writer. I'm flattered, but I don't quite believe it.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#7. I was born in Cuba but was made in the USA.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#8. I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#9. Every book I think will be my last one because after finishing I have the sense that I've said all I have to say, but I always seem to find a new way of repeating myself.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#10. My writing, such as it is, grows out of my sense of discolation, I mean, dislocation. Having lost my place, I write to find my place, or to find once again that I have lost my place.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#11. My father's death took me to a place I had never been and a place I had never left. In his absence, I've had to rely more on myself.

Gustavo Perez Firmat