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Authors & Writing
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The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
-Jorge Luis Borges, cited in A biographical study of a poet of Buenos Aires by Evaristo Carriego, 1930
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A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Books
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Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Conversation
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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Discovery
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Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Flattery
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The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Innovation
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The original is unfaithful to the translation.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Leadership
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One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Libraries
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In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Love
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To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Memory
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I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Procrastination
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The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Proverbial Wisdom
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Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Quotations
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Life itself is a quotation.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Suicide
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Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Time
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Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Travel
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Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Books by and about Jorge Luis Borges