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 Copy Share Image
“It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed,… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.” — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." [As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“In Book VIII of the Odyssey we read that the gods weave misfortunes into the pattern of events to make a song… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope,… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them. — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy” — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.” — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“At my age, one should be aware of one's limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love. — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
“The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits. — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
I don't think we're capable of knowledge, but I like to keep an open mind. So if you ask me whether I believe in… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces "every"… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes,… — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left. — Jorge Luis Borges Copy Share Image
