Books Quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Paradise will be a kind of library”

— Jorge Luis Borges

I have always come to life after coming to books.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

— Jorge Luis Borges

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

— Jorge Luis Borges

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

— Jorge Luis Borges

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

“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

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds; there are those who cannot imagine a world without water; but in…

— Jorge Luis Borges

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“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

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

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the…

— Jorge Luis Borges

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping…

— 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

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

“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

“If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two…

— 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

The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully,…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“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

“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them.…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“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

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

“The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Let no one reduce to tears or reproach This statement of the mastery of God, Who, with magnificent irony, gave Me at…

— Jorge Luis Borges

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves…

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— Jorge Luis Borges