Writing Quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

All writing is dreaming

— Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is only a guided dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“When a writer dies, he becomes his books.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors.”

— jorge luis borges

Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

— Jorge Luis Borges

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

— Jorge Luis Borges

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound…

— Jorge Luis Borges

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by…

— Jorge Luis Borges

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the…

— Jorge Luis Borges

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have…

— Jorge Luis Borges

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my…

— Jorge Luis Borges

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I try to avoid purple patches, fine writing, all that kind of thing... because I think they're a mistake. And then sometimes…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly…

— Jorge Luis Borges

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or…

— Jorge Luis Borges

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music,…

— Jorge Luis Borges

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,'…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a…

— Jorge Luis Borges

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“ Boast of Quietness Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

— Jorge Luis Borges