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Had I To Give Advice To Writers (and I Do Not Think They Need It, Because Everyone Has To Find Out Things For Himself), I Would Tell Them Simply This; I Would Ask Them To Tamper As Little As They Can With Their Own Work. I Do Not Think Tinkering Does Any Good. The Moment Comes When One Has Found Out What One Can Do - When One Has Found One's Natural Voice, One's Rhythm. Then I Do Not Think That Slight Emendations Should Prove Useful.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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Had I To Give

Jorge Luis Borges

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Had I To Give Advice To Writers (and I Do Not Think They Need It, Because Everyone Has To Find Out Things For Himself), I Would Tell Them Simply This; I Would Ask Them To Tamper As Little As They Can With Their Own Work. I Do Not Think Tinkering Does Any Good. The Moment Comes When One Has Found Out What One Can Do - When One Has Found One's Natural Voice, One's Rhythm. Then I Do Not Think That Slight Emendations Should Prove Useful.

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When I Feel I'm Going To Write Something, Then I Just Am Quiet And I Try To Listen. Then Something Comes Through. And I Do What I Can In Order Not To Tamper With It.

To Say Good-bye Is To Deny Separation; It Is To Say Today We Play At Going Our Own Ways, But We'll See Each Other Tomorrow. Men Invented Farewells Because They Somehow Knew Themselves To Be Immortal, Even While Seeing Themselves As Contingent And Ephemeral.

At The Beginning Of Their Careers Many Writers Have A Need To Overwrite. They Choose Carefully Turned-out Phrases; They Want To Impress Their Readers With Their Large Vocabularies. By The Excesses Of Their Language, These Young Men And Women Try To Hide Their Sense Of Inexperience. With Maturity The Writer Becomes More Secure In His Ideas. He Finds His Real Tone And Develops A Simple And Effective Style.

Every Writer Creates His Own Precursors. His Work Modifies Our Conception Of The Past, As It Will Modify The Future.

In The Order Of Literature, As In Others, There Is No Act That Is Not The Coronation Of An Infinite Series Of Causes And The Source Of An Infinite Series Of Effects.

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

The Original Is Unfaithful To The Translation.

Time Is The Substance Of Which We Are Made

The Execution Was Set For The 29th Of March, At Nine In The Morning. This Delay Was Due To A Desire On The Part Of The Authorities To Act Slowly And Impersonally, In The Manner Of Planets Or Vegetables.

When Writers Die They Become Books, Which Is, After All, Not Too Bad An Incarnation.

I Saw All The Mirrors On Earth And None Of Them Reflected Me.

My Undertaking Is Not Difficult, Essentially. I Should Only Have To Be Immortal To Carry It Out.

The Flattery Of Posterity Is Not Worth Much More Than Contemporary Flattery, Which Is Worth Nothing.

My Friends Tell Me That I Am An Intruder, That I Don't Really Write When I Attempt Poetry. But Those Of My Friends Who Write In Prose Say That I'm No Writer When I Attempt Prose. So Really I Don't Know What To Do, I'm In A Quandary.

I Live In A Grey World, Rather Like The Silver Screen World. But Yellow Stands Out.

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.

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 An Afterlife Or Not, Whether I Believe In God Or Not, I Can Only Answer You That All Things Are Possible. And If All Things Are Possible, Heaven And Hell And The Angels Are Also Possible. They're Not To Be Ruled Out.

Thus My Life Is A Flight And I Lose Everything And Everything Belongs To Oblivion, Or To Him.

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

I Will Pause To Consider This Eternity From Which The Subsequent Ones Derive.

The Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

I Walk Slowly, Like One Who Comes From So Far Away He Doesn't Expect To Arrive

I Believe That In Time We Will Have Reached The Point Where We Will Deserve To Be Free Of Government.

I Don't Think I Can Really Believe In Doomsday; I Could Hardly Believe In Rewards And Punishments, In Heaven Or Hell. As I Wrote Down In One Of My Sonnets - I Seem To Be Always Plagiarizing, Imitating Myself Or Somebody Else For That Matter - I Think I Am Quite Unworthy Of Heaven Or Of Hell, And Even Of Immortality.

Reality Favors Symmetry.

Creativity Is Suspended Between Memory And Forgetting.

I Believe Books Will Never Disappear. It Is Impossible For It To Happen. Of All Man's Diverse Tools, Undoubtedly The Most Astounding Are His Books... If Books Were To Disappear, History Would Disappear. So Would Man.

He Constructed A Vast Labyrinthine Of Periods, Made Impassable By The Piling-up Of Clauses Upon Clauses-clauses In Which Oversight And Bad Grammar Seemed Manifestations Of Disdain.

Unlike The Novel, A Short Story May Be, For All Purposes, Essential.

No One Is Anyone, One Single Immortal Man Is All Men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I Am God, I Am Hero, I Am Philosopher, I Am Demon And I Am World, Which Is A Tedious Way Of Saying That I Do Not Exist.

The Thought Came Over Me That Never Would One Full And Absolute Moment, Containing All The Others, Justify My Life, That All Of My Instants Would Be Provisional Phases, Annihilators Of The Past Turned To Face The Future, And That Beyond The Episodic, The Present, The Circumstantial, We Were Nobody.

A Writer's Work Is The Product Of Laziness.

Lully's Machine, Mill's Fear And Lasswitz's Chaotic Library Can Be The Subject Of Jokes, But They Exaggerate A Propensity Which Is Common: Making Metaphysics And The Arts Into A Kind Of Play With Combinations.

I Cannot Sleep Unless I Am Surrounded By Books.

The Steps A Man Takes From The Day Of His Birth Until That Of His Death Trace In Time An Inconcievable Figure. The Divine Mind Intuitively Grasps That Form Immediately, As Men Do A Triangle.

This Felicitous Supposition Declared That There Is Only One Individual, And That This Indivisible Individual Is Every One Of The Separate Beings In The Universe, And That These Beings Are The Instruments And Masks Of Divinity Itself.

Emma Dropped The Paper. Her First Impression Was Of A Weak Feeling In Her Stomach And In Her Knees; Then Of Blind Guilt, Of Unreality, Of Coldness, Of Fear; Then She Wished That It Were Already The Next Day. Immediately Afterwards She Realized That That Wish Was Futile Because The Death Of Her Father Was The Only Thing That Had Happened In The World, And It Would Go On Happening Endlessly.

Whatever One Man Does, It Is As If All Men Did It. For That Reason, It Is Not Unfair That One Disobedience In A Garden Should Contaminate All Humanity; For That Reason It Is Not Unjust That The Crucifixion Of A Single Jew Should Be Sufficient To Save It.

I, Who Have Been So Many Men In Vain, Want To Be One Man, Myself Alone. From Out Of A Whirlwind The Voice Of God Replied: I Am Not, Either. I Dreamed The World The Way You Dreamed Your Work, My Shakespeare: One Of The Forms Of My Dream Was You, Who, Like Me, Are Many And One.

In The Course Of A Life Devoted Less To Living Than To Reading, I Have Verified Many Times That Literary Intentions And Theories Are Nothing More Than Stimuli And That The Final Work Usually Ignores Or Even Contradicts Them.

The Future Has No Other Reality Than As Present Hope, And The Past Is No More Than Present Memory.

Time Is The Tiger That Devours Me, But I Am That Tiger.

Time Can't Be Measured In Days The Way Money Is Measured In Pesos And Centavos, Because All Pesos Are Equal, While Every Day, Perhaps Every Hour, Is Different.

If I Were Asked To Name The Chief Event In My Life, I Should Say My Father's Library.

Sometimes, Looking At The Many Books I Have At Home, I Feel I Shall Die Before I Come To The End Of Them, Yet I Cannot Resist The Temptation Of Buying New Books. Whenever I Walk Into A Bookstore And Find A Book On One Of My Hobbies — For Example, Old English Or Old Norse Poetry — I Say To Myself, “what A Pity I Can’t Buy That Book, For I Already Have A Copy At Home.

I Am Attracted To Fantastic Writing, And Fantastic Reading, Of Course. But I Think Things That We Call Fantastic May Be Real, In The Sense Of Being Real Symbols.

A Writer, Or Any Man, Must Believe That Whatever Happens To Him Is An Instrument; Everything Has Been Given For An End. This Is Even Stronger In The Case Of The Artist. Everything That Happens, Including Humiliations, Embarrassments, Misfortunes, All Has Been Given Like Clay, Like Material For One's Art. One Must Accept It.

In Fact I'm In Too Much Of A Mental Muddle To Know Where I Am - An Idealist Or Not. I'm A Mere Man Of Letters, And I Do What I Can With Those Subjects.

If You Using Local Color In An Unobtrusive Way, It Is All For The Good. But If You Stress It, The Whole Thing Is Artificial. But It Should Be Used, I Mean, It's Not Forbidden. But You Don't Have To Stress It.

I Have Always Imagined That Paradise Will Be A Kind Of Library.

I Know Of One Semibarbarous Zone Whose Librarians Repudiate The "vain And Superstitious Habit" Of Trying To Find Sense In Books, Equating Such A Quest With Attempting To Find Meaning In Dreams Or In The Chaotic Lines On The Palms Of One's Hand.

You Don't Have To Try To Be Contemporary. You Are Already Contemporary. What One Has In Mythology Is Being Evolved All The Time. Personally, I Think I Can Do With Greek And Old Norse Mythology. For Example, I Don't Think I Stand In Need Of Planes Or Of Railways Or Of Cars.

In Vain Have Oceans Been Squandered On You, In Vain The Sun, Wonderfully Seen Through Whitman’s Eyes. You Have Used Up The Years And They Have Used Up You, And Still, And Still, You Have Not Written The Poem.

Poets, Like The Blind, Can See In The Dark.

Chang Tzu Tells Us Of A Persevering Man Who After Three Laborious Years Mastered The Art Of Dragon-slaying. For The Rest Of His Days, He Had Not A Single Opportunity To Test His Skills.

Blindness Has Not Been For Me A Total Misfortune; It Should Not Be Seen In A Pathetic Way. It Should Be Seen As A Way Of Life: One Of The Styles Of Living.

My Father And He Had Cemented One Of Those English Friendships Which Begin By Avoiding Intimacies And Eventually Eliminate Speech Altogether.

Im Merely A Dreamer, And Then A Writer, And My Happiest Moments Are When I'm A Reader.

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

Loneliness Does Not Worry Me; Life Is Difficult Enough, Putting Up With Yourself And With Your Own Habits.

As To My Writing Short Pieces, There Are Two Reasons I Can Give You. The First Is My Invincible Laziness. The Second Is That I've Always Been Fond Of Short Stories, And It Always Took Me Some Trouble To Get Through A Novel.

I Saw A Sunset In Queretaro That Seemed To Reflect The Color Of A Rose In Bengal.

The Machinery Of The World Is Far Too Complex For The Simplicity Of Men.

The Man Who Has Learned That Three Plus One Are Four Doesn't Have To Go Through A Proof Of That Assertion With Coins, Or Dice, Or Chess Pieces, Or Pencils. He Knows It, And That's That. He Cannot Conceive A Different Sum. There Are Mathematicians Who Say That Three Plus One Is A Tautology For Four, A Different Way Of Saying "four" ... If Three Plus One Can Be Two, Or Fourteen, Then Reason Is Madness.

All That Happens To Us, Including Our Humiliations, Our Misfortunes, Our Embarrassments, All Is Given To Us As Raw Material, As Clay, So That We May Shape Our Art.

Two Aesthetics Exist: The Passive Aesthetic Of Mirrors And The Active Aesthetic Of Prisms. Guided By The Former, Art Turns Into A Copy Of The Environment's Objectivity Or The Individual's Psychic History. Guided By The Latter, Art Is Redeemed, Makes The World Into Its Instrument, And Forges, Beyond Spatial And Temporal Prisons, A Personal Vision.

Nowadays, One Of The Churches Of Tlön Maintains Platonically That Such And Such A Pain, Such And Such A Greenish-yellow Colour, Such And Such A Temperature, Such And Such A Sound, Etc., Make Up The Only Reality There Is. All Men, In The Climactic Instant Of Coitus, Are The Same Man. All Men Who Repeat One Line Of Shakespeare Are William Shakespeare.

You May Win Your Heart's Desire, But In The End You're Cheated Of It By Death.

For Me, Beauty Is A Physical Sensation, Something We Feel With Our Whole Body. It Is Not The Result Of Judgement. We Do Not Arrive At It By Way Of Rules. We Either Feel Beauty Or We Don't.

Translations Are A Partial And Precious Documentation Of The Changes The Text Suffers.

The Tango Is A Direct Expression Of Something That Poets Have Often Tried To State In Words: The Belief That A Fight May Be A Celebration.

You Can't Measure Time By Days, The Way You Measure Money By Dollars And Cents, Because Dollars Are All The Same While Every Day Is Different And Maybe Every Hour As Well.

Had I To Give Advice To Writers (and I Do Not Think They Need It, Because Everyone Has To Find Out Things For Himself), I Would Tell Them Simply This; I Would Ask Them To Tamper As Little As They Can With Their Own Work. I Do Not Think Tinkering Does Any Good. The Moment Comes When One Has Found Out What One Can Do - When One Has Found One's Natural Voice, One's Rhythm. Then I Do Not Think That Slight Emendations Should Prove Useful.

It Seemed Incredible That This Day, A Day Without Warnings Or Omens, Might Be That Of My Implacable Death.

What A Writer Wants To Do Is Not What He Does.

I Suppose Every Poet Has His Own Private Mythology. Maybe He's Unaware Of It. People Tell Me That I Have Evolved A Private Mythology Of Tigers, Of Blades, Of Labyrinths, And I"m Unaware Of The Fact This Is So. My Readers Are Finding It All The Time. But I Think Perhaps That Is The Duty Of Poet.

Time Is A Fire That Consumes Me, But I Am The Fire.

Time Management

The Great American Writer Herman Melville Says Somewhere In The White Whale That A Man Ought To Be 'a Patriot To Heaven,' And I Believe It Is A Good Thing, This Ambition To Be A Cosmopolitan, This Idea To Be Citizens Not Of A Small Parcel Of The World That Changes According To The Currents Of Politics, According To The Wars, To What Occurs, But To Feel That The Whole World Is Our Country.

There Is No Point In Being Overwhelmed By The Appalling Total Of Human Sufferring; Such A Total Does Not Exist. Neither Poverty Nor Pain Is Accumulable.

In Adultery, There Is Usually Tenderness And Self-sacrifice; In Murder, Courage; In Profanation And Blasphemy, A Certain Satanic Splendour. Judas Elected Those Offences Unvisited By Any Virtues: Abuse Of Confidence And Informing.

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

When One Confesses To An Act, One Ceases To Be An Actor In It And Becomes Its Witness, Becomes A Man That Observes And Narrates It And No Longer The Man That Performed It.

I Thought Of A Labyrinth Of Labyrinths, Of One Sinuous Spreading Labyrinth That Would Encompass The Past And The Future . . . I Felt Myself To Be, For An Unknown Period Of Time, An Abstract Perceiver Of The World.

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.

Imprecision Is Tolerable And Verisimilar In Literature, Because We Always Tend Towards It In Life.

Music, Feelings Of Happiness, Mythology, Faces Worn By Time, Certain Twilights And Certain Places, Want To Tell Us Something, Or They Told Us Something That We Should Not Have Missed, Or They Are About To Tell Us Something; This Imminence Of A Revelation That Is Not Produced Is, Perhaps, The Esthetic Event.

People Think That I've Committed Myself To Idealism, To Solipsism, Or To Doctrines Of The Cabala, Because I've Used Them In My Tales. But Really I Was Only Trying To See What Could Be Done With Them. On The Other Hand, It Might Be Argued That If I Use Them It's Because I Was Feeling An Affinity To Them. Of Course, That's True.

Yo, Que Me Figuraba El Paraíso / Bajo La Especie De Una Biblioteca. I Have Always Imagined Paradise As A Kind Of Library.

What Man Of Us Has Never Felt, Walking Through The Twilight Or Writing Down A Date From His Past, That He Has Lost Something Infinite?

This Web Of Time--the Strands Of Which Approach One Another, Bifurcate, Intersect Or Ignore Eachother Through The Centuries--embrace Every Posibility.

All Theories Are Legitimate, No Matter. What Matters Is What You Do With Them.

He Thought That The Rose Was To Be Found In Its Own Eternity And Not In His Words; And That We May Mention Or Allude To A Thing, But Not Express It.

There Is A Concept Which Corrupts And Upsets All Others. I Refer Not To Evil, Whose Limited Realm Is That Of Ethics; I Refer To The Infinite.

There Is An Hour Of The Afternoon When The Plain Is On The Verge Of Saying Something. It Never Says, Or Perhaps It Says It Infinitely, Or Perhaps We Do Not Understand It, Or We Understand It And It Is Untranslatable As Music.

To Think, Analyze And Invent, He [pierre Menard] Also Wrote Me, “are Not Anomalous Acts, But The Normal Respiration Of The Intelligence. To Glorify The Occasional Fulfillment Of This Function, To Treasure Ancient Thoughts Of Others, To Remember With Incredulous Amazement That The Doctor Universal Is Thought, Is To Confess Our Languor Or Barbarism. Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas, And I Believe That In The Future He Will Be." (jorge Luis Borges, "pierre Menard, Author Of Don Quixote, 1939)

Perhaps The Apparent Favor Of The Universe Is No More Than The Crocodile Grin Of A Doberman Breathing Hard And About To Be Hungry?

There Is No Intellectual Exercise Which Is Not Ultimately Useless.

Being With You And Not Being With You Is The Only Way I Have To Measure Time.

From My Weakness, I Drew Strength That Never Left Me.

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.

The Future Is Inevitable And Precise, But It May Not Occur. God Lurks In The Gaps.

Democracy Is An Abuse Of Statistics.

I Owe The Discovery Of Uqbar To The Conjunction Of A Mirror And An Encyclopedia.

I Think Of Reading A Book As No Less An Experience Than Travelling Or Falling In Love.

Falling In Love

In The Critic's Vocabulary, The Word "precursor" Is Indispensable, But It Should Be Cleansed Of All Connotations Of Polemic Or Rivalry. The Fact Is That Every Writer Creates His Own Precursors. His Work Modifies Our Conception Of The Past, As It Will Modify The Future." -- Essay: "kafka And His Precursors

If Space Is Infinite, We May Be At Any Point In Space. If Time Is Infinite, We May Be At Any Point In Time.

Kafka Had The Sense Of Guilt. I Don't Think I Have Because I Don't Believe In Free Will. Because What I Have Done Has Been Done, Well, For Me Or Through Me. But I Haven't Done It Really. But I Don't Believe In Free Will, I Can't Feel Guilty.

The Mightiest Love Was Granted Him Love That Does Not Expect To Be Loved.

Writing Long Books Is A Laborious And Impoverishing Act Of Foolishness: Expanding In Five Hundred Pages An Idea That Could Be Perfectly Explained In A Few Minutes. A Better Procedure Is To Pretend That Those Books Already Exist And To Offer A Summary, A Commentary.

Being An Agnostic Means All Things Are Possible, Even God, Even The Holy Trinity. This World Is So Strange That Anything May Happen, Or May Not Happen. Being An Agnostic Makes Me Live In A Larger, A More Fantastic Kind Of World, Almost Uncanny. It Makes Me More Tolerant.

Films Are Even Stranger, For What We Are Seeing Are Not Disguised People But Photographs Of Disguised People, And Yet We Believe Them While The Film Is Being Shown.

In The Critics' Vocabulary, The Work 'precursor' Is Indispensable, But It Should Be Cleansed Of All Connotations Of Polemics Or Rivalry.

Once I Am Dead, There Will Be No Lack Of Pious Hands To Throw Me Over The Railing; My Grave Will Be The Fathomless Air; My Body Will Sink Endlessly And Decay And Dissolve In The Wind Generated By The Fall, Which Is Infinite.

I Have Sometimes Suspected That The Only Thing That Holds No Mystery Is Happiness, Because It Is Its Own Justification.

Time, Which Despoils Castles, Enriches Verses.

The Minotaur More Than Justifies The Existence Of The Labyrinth.

We (the Indivisible Divinity That Works In Us) Have Dreamed The World. We Have Dreamed It Resistant, Mysterious, Visible, Ubiquitous In Space And Firm In Time, But We Have Allowed Slight, And Eternal, Bits Of The Irrational To Form Part Of Its Architecture So As To Know That It Is False.

The Worst Labyrinth Is Not That Intricate Form That Can Entrap Us Forever, But A Single And Precise Straight Line

A Book Is Not An Isolated Being: It Is A Relationship, An Axis Of Innumerable Relationships

I Secretly Assumed, As Poets Do, The Duty On Me To Define The Moon.

To Bless Thine Enemy Is A Good Way To Satisfy Thy Vanity.

The Heresies We Should Fear Are Those Which Can Be Confused With Orthodoxy.

When You Reach My Age, You Realize You Couldn't Have Done Things Very Much Better Or Much Worse Than You Did Them In The First Place.

To Arrange A Library Is To Practice In A Quiet And Modest Way The Art Of Criticism.

I Thought That A Man Can Be An Enemy Of Other Men, Of The Moments Of Other Men, But Not Of A Country: Not Of Fireflies, Words, Gardens, Streams Of Water, Sunsets.

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.

I Know That When I Think Of Myself As Being Utterly Worn Out, When I Think That Somehow I Have Nothing More To Write, Then Something Is Happening Within Me. And, In Due Course, It Bubbles Up; It Comes To The Surface, And Then I Do My Best To Listen. But There's Nothing Mystical About All This. I Suppose All Writers Do The Same.

I Have Tried (i Am Not Sure How Successfully) To Write Plain Tales. I Dare Not Say They Are Simple; There Is Not A Simple Page, A Simple Word, On Earth -- For All Pages, All Words, Predicate The Universe, Whose Most Notorious Attribute Is Its Complexity.

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

A Writer - And, I Believe, Generally All Persons - Must Think That Whatever Happens To Him Or Her Is A Resource.

You Who Read Me, Are You Sure Of Understanding My Language?

As The End Approaches, There Are No Longer Any Images From Memory - There Are Only Words.

Personally, I Am A Hedonistic Reader; I Have Never Read A Book Merely Because It Was Ancient. I Read Books For The Aesthetic Emotions They Offer Me, And I Ignore The Commentaries And Criticism.

There Are Those Who Seek The Love Of A Woman To Forget Her, To Not Think About Her.

I Don't Think There's Any Essential Difference, At Least For Me, Between Writing Poetry And Writing Prose.

I Am Not Sure Of Anything, I Know Nothing . . . Can You Imagine That I Don't Even Know The Date Of My Own Death?

Dictatorships Foster Oppression, Dictatorships Foster Servitude, Dictatorships Foster Cruelty; More Abominable Is The Fact That They Foster Idiocy.

The People Of Tlön Are Taught That The Act Of Counting Modifies The Amount Counted, Turning Indefinites Into Definites. The Fact That Several Persons Counting The Same Quantity Come To The Same Result Is For The Psychologists Of Tlön An Example Of The Association Of Ideas Or Of Memorization.

I Do Not Write For A Select Minority, Which Means Nothing To Me, Nor For That Adulated Platonic Entity Known As ‘the Masses’. Both Abstractions, So Dear To The Demagogue, I Disbelieve In. I Write For Myself And For My Friends, And I Write To Ease The Passing Of Time.

As A Boy, I Used To Marvel That The Letters In A Closed Book Did Not Get Scrambled And Lost Overnight.

Another School Declares That All Time Has Already Transpired And That Our Life Is Only The Crepuscular And No Doubt Falsified And Mutilated Memory Or Reflection Of An Irrecoverable Process.

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.

It Only Takes Two Facing Mirrors To Build A Labyrinth.

I Know Of A Wild Region Whose Librarians Repudiate The Vain Superstitious Custom Of Seeking Any Sense In Books And Compare It To Looking For Meaning In Dreams Or In The Chaotic Lines Of One's Hands . . . They Admit That The Inventors Of Writing Imitated The Twenty-five Natural Symbols, But They Maintain That This Application Is Accidental And That Books In Themselves Mean Nothing. This Opinion - We Shall See - Is Not Altogether False.

A Writer - And, I Believe, Generally All Persons - Must Think That Whatever Happens To Him Or Her Is A Resource. All Things Have Been Given To Us For A Purpose, And An Artist Must Feel This More Intensely. All That Happens To Us, Including Our Humiliations, Our Misfortunes, Our Embarrassments, All Is Given To Us As Raw Material, As Clay, So That We May Shape Our Art.

While We Are Asleep In This World, We Are Awake In Another One

Time Broadens The Scope Of Verses And I Know Of Some Which, Like Music, Are Everything For All Men.

I Don't Think Esthetic Schools Are Important. What Is Important Is The Use That Is Made Of Them, Or Whatever The Individual Writer Does.

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely. But If You're Writing A Story, You Have To Make It As Plausible As You Can, Because If Not, The Reader's Imagination Will Reject It.

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

The Universe Is Composed Of An Indefinite And Perhaps Infinite Number Of Hexagonal Galleries.

Time Forks Perpetually Toward Innumerable Futures.

Heaven And Hell Seem Out Of Proportion To Me: The Actions Of Men Do Not Deserve So Much.

I Would Rather Like To Think Of God As Being A Kind Of Adventurer - Even As Wells Thought About Him - Or Perhaps As Something Within Us Making For Some Unknown Purpose.

Besides, Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts.

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.

A Labyrinth Of Symbols... An Invisible Labyrinth Of Time.

We Are Our Memory, We Are That Chimerical Museum Of Shifting Shapes, That Pile Of Broken Mirrors.

Although I'm Very Lazy When It Comes To Writing, I'm Not That Lazy When It Comes To Thinking. I Like To Develop The Plan Of A Short Story, Then Cut It As Short As Possible, Try To Evolve All The Necessary Details. I Know Far More About The Characters Than What Actually Comes Out Of The Writing.

Let Others Pride Themselves About How Many Pages They Have Written; I'd Rather Boast About The Ones I've Read.

How Can We Manage To Illuminate The Pathos Of Our Lives?

Reading Is An Activity Subsequent To Writing: More Resigned, More Civil, More Intellectual.

A Man Sets Himself The Task Of Portraying The World. Shortly Before He Dies He Discovers That This Patient Labyrinth Of Lines Is A Drawing Of His Own Face.

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 Stuff He's Turning Out.

I Have Committed The Worst Of Sins One Can Commit... I Have Not Been Happy.

We Forget That We Are All Dead Men Conversing With Dead Men.

My Books Standing There On The Shelf Do Not Know That I Have Written Them.

Death Is Just Infinity Closing In.

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

The Word Happiness Exists In Every Language; It Is Plausible The Thing Itself Exists.

Do You Want To See What Human Eyes Have Never Seen? Look At The Moon. Do You Want To Hear What Ears Have Never Heard? Listen To The Bird's Cry. Do You Want To Touch What Hands Have Never Touched? Touch The Earth. Verily I Say That God Is About To Create The World.

In Spanish It Is Very Difficult To Make Things Flow, Because Words Are Over-long. But In English, You Have Light Words.

Why Do You Seem So Annoyed At What I'm Saying?" "because We're Too Much Like Each Other. I Loathe Your Face, Which Is A Caricature Of Mine, I Loathe Your Voice, Which Is A Mockery Of Mine, I Loathe Your Pathetic Syntax, Which Is My Own.

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.

Of All Man’s Instruments, The Most Wondrous, No Doubt, Is The Book. The Other Instruments Are Extensions Of His Body. The Microscope, The Telescope, Are Extensions Of His Sight; The Telephone Is The Extension Of His Voice; Then We Have The Plow And The Sword, Extensions Of The Arm. But The Book Is Something Else Altogether: The Book Is An Extension Of Memory And Imagination.

The Falklands Thing Was A Fight Between Two Bald Men Over A Comb.

The Poverty Of Yesterday Was Less Squalid Than The Poverty We Purchase With Our Industry Today. Fortunes Were Smaller Then As Well.

The European And The North American Consider That A Book That Has Been Awarded Any Kind Of Prize Must Be Good; The Argentine Allows For The Possibility That The Book Might Not Be Bad, Despite The Prize.

I Have Preferred To Teach My Students Not English Literature But My Love For Certain Authors, Or, Even Better, Certain Pages, Or Even Better Than That, Certain Lines. One Falls In Love With A Line, Then With A Page, Then With An Author. Well, Why Not? It Is A Beautiful Process.

Falling In Love

The Things That Are Said In Literature Are Always The Same. What Is Important Is The Way They Are Said. Looking For Metaphors, For Example: When I Was A Young Man I Was Always Hunting For New Metaphors. Then I Found Out That Really Good Metaphors Are Always The Same.

It May Be That Universal History Is The History Of The Different Intonations Given A Handful Of Metaphors.

There Is Nothing In The World That Is Not Mysterious, But The Mystery Is More Evident In Certain Things Than In Others: In The Sea, In The Eyes Of The Elders, In The Color Yellow, And In Music.

What Will Die With Me When I Die, What Pathetic Or Fragile Form Will The World Lose?

Any Life, However Long And Complicated It May Be, Actually Consists Of A Single Moment — The Moment When A Man Knows Forever More Who He Is.

The Gods Weave Misfortunes For Men, So That The Generations To Come Will Have Something To Sing About.” Mallarmé Repeats, Less Beautifully, What Homer Said; “tout Aboutit En Un Livre,” Everything Ends Up In A Book. The Greeks Speak Of Generations That Will Sing; Mallarmé Speaks Of An Object, Of A Thing Among Things, A Book. But The Idea Is The Same; The Idea That We Are Made For Art, We Are Made For Memory, We Are Made For Poetry, Or Perhaps We Are Made For Oblivion. But Something Remains, And That Something Is History Or Poetry, Which Are Not Essentially Different.

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.

When I Wake Up, I Wake To Something Worse. It’s The Astonishment Of Being Myself

I Had Always Thought Of Paradise / In Form And Image As A Library.

Days And Nights Passed Over This Despair Of Flesh, But One Morning He Awoke, Looked (with Calm Now) At The Blurred Things That Lay About Him, And Felt, Inexplicably, The Way One Might Feel Upon Recognizing A Melody Or A Voice, That All This Had Happened To Him Before And That He Had Faced It With Fear But Also With Joy And Hopefulness And Curiosity. Then He Descended Into His Memory, Which Seemed To Him Endless, And Managed To Draw Up From That Vertigo The Lost Remembrance That Gleamed Like A Coin In The Rain - Perhaps Because He Had Never Really Looked At It Except (perhaps) In A Dream.

I Try To Avoid Purple Patches, Fine Writing, All That Kind Of Thing... Because I Think They're A Mistake. And Then Sometimes It Comes Through And Sometimes It Doesn't, But That's Not Up To Me. It's Up To Chance.

I Have No Way Of Knowing Whether The Events That I Am About To Narrate Are Effects Or Causes.

The Earth We Inhabit Is An Error, An Incompetent Parody. Mirrors And Paternity Are Abominable Because They Multiply And Affirm It.

Let Neither Tear Nor Reproach Besmirch This Declaration Of The Mastery Of God Who, With Magnificent Irony, Granted Me Both The Gift Of Books And The Night.

I Foresee That Man Will Resign Himself Each Day To New Abominations, And Soon That Only Bandits And Soldiers Will Be Left...

Many People Have Thought Of Me As A Thinker, As A Philosopher, Or Even As A Mystic. Well The Truth Is That Though I Have Found Reality Perplexing Enough - In Fact, I Find It Gets More Perplexing All The Time - I Never Think Of Myself As A Thinker.

The Task Of Art Is To Transform What Is Continuously Happening To Us, To Transform All Of These Things Into Symbols, Into Music, Into Something Which Can Last In Man’s Memory. That Is Our Duty. If We Don’t Fulfill It, We Feel Unhappy.

The Central Fact Of My Life Has Been The Existence Of Words And The Possibility Of Weaving Those Words Into Poetry.

I Think Of Myself As Being An Ethical Man, But I Don't Try To Teach Ethics. I Have No Message. I Know Little About Contemporary Life. I Don't Read A Newspaper. I Dislike Politics And Politicians. I Belong To No Party Whatever. My Private Life Is A Private Life. I Try To Avoid Photography And Publicity.

Best Thing To Happen For A Poet. A Fine Death, No? An Impressive Death.

The Mathematical Sciences Wield Their Particular Language Made Of Digits And Signs, No Less Subtle Than Any Other.

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