Writer Quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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

— 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

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Jorge Luis Borges

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

— 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

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

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

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I think it's all to the good that a writer shouldn't be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may…

— Jorge Luis Borges

When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through.…

— Jorge Luis Borges

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating…

— 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

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

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

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things…

— 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

“Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of…

— Jorge Luis Borges

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

“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

“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

Writing is only a guided dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges

“I, that used to figure Paradise In the guise of a library”

— Jorge Luis Borges

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

— 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