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I Think Of Myself Primarily As A Reader, Then Also A Writer, But That's More Or Less Irrelevant. I Think I'm A Good Reader, I'm A Good Reader In Many Languages, Especially In English, Since Poetry Came To Me Through The English Language, Initially Through My Father's Love Of Swinburn, Of Tennyson, And Also Of Keats, Shelley And So On - Not Through My Native Tongue, Not Through Spanish. It Came To Me As A Kind Of Spell. I Didn't Understand It, But I Felt It.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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I Think Of Myself

Jorge Luis Borges

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I Think Of Myself Primarily As A Reader, Then Also A Writer, But That's More Or Less Irrelevant. I Think I'm A Good Reader, I'm A Good Reader In Many Languages, Especially In English, Since Poetry Came To Me Through The English Language, Initially Through My Father's Love Of Swinburn, Of Tennyson, And Also Of Keats, Shelley And So On - Not Through My Native Tongue, Not Through Spanish. It Came To Me As A Kind Of Spell. I Didn't Understand It, But I Felt It.

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

One Concept Corrupts And Confuses The Others. I Am Not Speaking Of The Evil Whose Limited Sphere Is Ethics; I Am Speaking Of The Infinite.

Soccer Is Popular Because Stupidity Is Popular.

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

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

I...have Always Known That My Destiny Was, Above All, A Literary Destiny — That Bad Things And Some Good Things Would Happen To Me, But That, In The Long Run, All Of It Would Be Converted Into Words. Particularly The Bad Things, Since Happiness Does Not Need To Be Transformed: Happiness Is Its Own End.

I Write For Myself, And Perhaps For Half A Dozen Friends. And That Should Be Enough. And That Might Improve The Quality Of My Writing. But If I Were Writing For Thousands Of People, Then I Would Write What Might Please Them. And As I Know Nothing About Them, And Maybe I'd Have A Rather Low Opinion Of Them, I Don't Think That Would Do Any Good To My Work.

I Can’t Talk About My Books. I Have Written Them And Tried To Forget Them. I Have Written Once, And Readers Have Read Me Many Times, No? I Try To Think Of What I Wrote, It’s Very Unhealthy To Think About The Past, The Case Of Elegies Is Very Sad, As Much As The Case Of Complaints.

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

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

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

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.

I Wonder If I Have Woven Through Dreams The Sexual Strife. I Don't Think So. But After All, My Business Is To Weave Dreams. I Suppose I May Be Allowed To Choose The Material.

When You Come Right Down To It, Opinions Are The Most Superficial Things About Anyone

Superficial Things

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

I Came To The Idea Of How Fine It Would Be To Think Of An Encyclopedia Of An Actual World, And Then Of An Encyclopedia, A Very Rigorous One Of Course, Of An Imaginary World, Where Everything Should Be Linked.

Besides, Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts.

Any Time Something Is Written Against Me, I Not Only Share The Sentiment But Feel I Could Do The Job Far Better Myself. Perhaps I Should Advise Would-be Enemies To Send Me Their Grievances Beforehand, With Full Assurance That They Will Receive My Every Aid And Support. I Have Even Secretly Longed To Write, Under A Pen Name, A Merciless Tirade Against Myself.

In My Next Life I Will Try To Commit More Errors.

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

I Suppose Identity Depends On Memory. And If My Memory Is Blotted Out, Then I Wonder If I Exist - I Mean, If I Am The Same Person. Of Course, I Don't Have To Solve That Problem. It's Up To God, If Any.

I Am Not Sure That I Exist, Actually. I Am All The Writers That I Have Read, All The People That I Have Met, All The Women That I Have Loved; All The Cities I Have Visited.

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

We Did Meet Forty Years Ago. At That Time We Were Both Influenced By Whitman And I Said, Jokingly In Part, 'i Don't Think Anything Can Be Done In Spanish, Do You?' Neruda Agreed, But We Decided It Was Too Late For Us To Write Our Verse In English. We'd Have To Make The Best Of A Second-rate Literature.

I Have Always Come To Life After Coming To Books.

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

The Exercise Of Letters Is Sometimes Linked To The Ambition To Construct An Absolute Book, A Book Of Books That Includes The Others Like A Platonic Archetype, An Object Whose Virtues Are Not Diminished By The Passage Of Time.

That Is What Always Happens: We Never Know Whether We Are Victors Or Whether We Are Defeated.

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.

His Life, Measured In Space And Time, Will Take Up A Mere Few Lines, Which My Ignorance Will Abbreviate Further.

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

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

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

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

Life And Death Have Been Lacking In My Life.

My Father Gave Me Free Run Of His Library. When I Think Of My Boyhood, I Think In Terms Of The Books I Read.

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.

There Are No Moral Or Intellectual Merits. Homer Composed The Odyssey; If We Postulate An Infinite Period Of Time, With Infinite Circumstances And Changes, The Impossible Thing Is Not To Compose The Odyssey, At Least Once.

Impossible Things

On The Floor, And Hanging On To The Bar, Squatted An Old Man, Immobile As An Object. His Years Had Reduced And Polished Him As Water Does A Stone Or The Generations Of Men Do A Sentence.

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.

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.

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.

Whoever Would Undertake Some Atrocious Enterprise Should Act As If It Were Already Accomplished Should Impose Upon Himself A Future As Irrevocable As The Past.

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.

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.

I Can Give You My Loneliness, My Darkness, The Hunger Of My Heart, I Am Trying To Bribe You With Uncertainty, With Danger, With Defeat.

To Fall In Love Is To Create A Religion That Has A Fallible God.

I Confess That I Have Not Cleared A Path Through All Seven Hundred Pages, I Confess To Having Examined Only Bits And Pieces, And Yet I Know What It Is, With That Bold And Legitimate Certainty With Which We Assert Our Knowledge Of A City, Without Ever Having Been Rewarded With The Intimacy Of All The Many Streets It Includes.

Many Of The Characters Are Fools And They're Always Playing Tricks On Me And Treating Me Badly.

A Book Is More Than A Verbal Structure Or Series Of Verbal Structures; It Is The Dialogue It Establishes With Its Reader And The Intonation It Imposes Upon His Voice And The Changing And Durable Images It Leaves In His Memory. A Book Is Not An Isolated Being: It Is A Relationship, An Axis Of Innumerable Relationships.

A Man Sets Out To Draw The World. As The Years Go By, He Peoples A Space With Images Of Provinces, Kingdoms, Mountains, Bays, Ships, Islands, Fishes, Rooms, Instruments, Stars, Horses, And Individuals. A Short Time Before He Dies, He Discovers That The Patient Labyrinth Of Lines Traces The Lineaments Of His Own Face.

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

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

I Might Accept Immortality, If I Had To Do It. But I Would Prefer - If There Is Any Afterlife - To Know Nothing Whatever About Borges, About His Experiences In This World.

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

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

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.

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

Time, Which Despoils Castles, Enriches Verses.

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

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

To Be Immortal Is Commonplace; Except For Man, All Creatures Are Immortal, For They Are Ignorant Of Death; What Is Divine, Terrible, Incomprehensible, Is To Know That One Is Immortal.

There's No Need To Build A Labyrinth When The Entire Universe Is One.

For Myth Is At The Beginning Of Literature, And Also At Its End.

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

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

It Is Clear That There Is No Classification Of The Universe That Is Not Arbitrary And Full Of Conjectures. The Reason For This Is Very Simple: We Do Not Know What Kind Of Thing The Universe Is.

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.

It Also Occurred To Him That Throughout History, Humankind Has Told Two Stories: The Story Of A Lost Ship Sailing The Mediterranean Seas In Quest Of A Beloved Isle, And The Story Of A God Who Allows Himself To Be Crucified On Golgotha.

I Think Of Myself Primarily As A Reader, Then Also A Writer, But That's More Or Less Irrelevant. I Think I'm A Good Reader, I'm A Good Reader In Many Languages, Especially In English, Since Poetry Came To Me Through The English Language, Initially Through My Father's Love Of Swinburn, Of Tennyson, And Also Of Keats, Shelley And So On - Not Through My Native Tongue, Not Through Spanish. It Came To Me As A Kind Of Spell. I Didn't Understand It, But I Felt It.

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.

The Dictionary Is Based On The Hypothesis -- Obviously An Unproven One -- That Languages Are Made Up Of Equivalent Synonyms.

Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas.

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.

God Must Not Engage In Theology. The Writer Must Not Destroy By Human Reasonings The Faith That Art Requires Of Us.

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.

The Mind Was Dreaming. The World Was Its Dream.

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

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.

A Book Is A Physical Object In A World Of Physical Objects. It Is A Set Of Dead Symbols. And Then The Right Reader Comes Along, And The Words—or Rather The Poetry Behind The Words, For The Words Themselves Are Mere Symbols—spring To Life, And We Have A Resurrection Of The Word.

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.

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.

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.

Israelites, Christians And Muslims Profess Immortality, But The Veneration They Render This World Proves They Believe Only In It, Since They Destine All Other Worlds, In Infinite Number, To Be Its Reward Or Punishment.

Reality Favors Symmetry.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Captivated By Its Discipline, Humanity Forgets And Goes On Forgetting That It Is The Discipline Of Chess Players, Not Of Angels.

The Fact Is That Poetry Is Not The Books In The Library . . . Poetry Is The Encounter Of The Reader With The Book, The Discovery Of The Book.

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

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.

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

I Cannot Sleep Unless I Am Surrounded By Books.

What I'm Really Concerned About Is Reaching One Person. And That Person May Be Myself For All I Know.

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.

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.

All Writing Is Dreaming

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.

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

Only In The Present Do Things Happen.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

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.

On Those Remote Pages [of 'a Certain Chinese Encyclopedia'] It Is Written That Animals Are Divided Into (a) Those That Belong To The Emperor, (b) Embalmed Ones, (c) Those That Are Trained, (d) Suckling Pigs, (e) Mermaids, (f ) Fabulous Ones, (g) Stray Dogs, (h) Those That Are Included In This Classification, (i) Those That Tremble As If They Were Mad, (j) Innumerable Ones, (k) Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel's Hair Brush, (l) Others, (m) Those That Have Just Broken A Flower Vase, (n) Those That Resemble Flies From A Distance.

The Minotaur More Than Justifies The Existence Of The Labyrinth.

I Have Used The Philosophers' Ideas For My Own Private Literary Purposes, But I Don't Think That I'm A Thinker. I Suppose That My Thinking Has Been Done For Me By Berkeley, By Hume, By Schopenhauer, By Mauthner Perhaps.

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.

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.

What Will Die With Me The Day I Die? What Pathetic Or Frail Image Will Be Lost To The World? The Voice Of Macedonio Fernandez, The Image Of A Bay Horse In A Vacant Lot On The Corner Of Sarrano And Charcas, A Bar Of Sulfur In The Drawer Of A Mahogany Desk?

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

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 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.

The Visible Universe Was An Illusion Or, More Precisely, A Sophism. Mirrors And Fatherhood Are Abominable Because They Multiply It And Extend It.

You Will Reply That Reality Hasn't The Slightest Need To Be Of Interest. And I'll Answer You That Reality May Avoid The Obligation To Be Interesting, But That Hypotheses May Not. In The Hypothesis You Have Postulated, Chance Intervenes Largely. Here Lies A Dead Rabbi; I Should Prefer A Purely Rabbinical Explanation; Not The Imaginary Mischances Of An Imaginary Robber.

He Was Very Religious; He Believed That He Had A Secret Pact With God Which Exempted Him From Doing Good In Exchange For Prayers And Piety.

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.

Art Always Opts For The Individual, The Concrete; Art Is Not Platonic.

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.

We Are As Ignorant Of The Meaning Of The Dragon As We Are Of The Meaning Of The Universe.

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.

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.

He Consorted With Prostitutes And Poets...and With Persons Even Worse.

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

We Accept Reality So Readily - Perhaps Because We Sense That Nothing Is Real.

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

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.

Beyond My Anxiety, Beyond This Writing, The Universe Waits, Inexhaustible, Inviting.

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

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

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

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

I Think It's All To The Good That A Writer Shouldn't Be Too Famous. Because, In A Country Where A Writer May Be Famous, He May Be Pandering To The Mob, Celebrity And So On.

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.

I Would Define The Baroque As That Style That Deliberately Exhausts (or Tries To Exhaust) Its Own Possibilities, And That Borders On Self-caricature. The Baroque Is The Final Stage In All Art, When Art Flaunts And Squanders Its Resources.

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

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.

I Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

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.

Writing Is Nothing More Than A Guided Dream.

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

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

My Advanced Age Has Taught Me The Resignation Of Being Borges.

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.

The Certainty That Everything Has Already Been Written Annuls Us, Or Renders Us Phantasmal.

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?

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.

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.

What You Really Value Is What You Miss, Not What You Have.

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.

Censorship Is The Mother Of Metaphor.

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.

I Have No Personal System Of Philosophy. I Never Attempt To Do That. I Am Merely A Man Of Letters.

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

I Hardly Know What I'm Going To Write - An Article, A Story, A Poem In Free Verse - Or In Some Regular Form. I Only Know That When I Have The First Sentence. And When The First Sentence Makes A Kind Of Pattern, Then I Find Out The Kind Of Rhythm I'm Looking For.

Poetry Remembers That It Was An Oral Art Before It Was A Written Art.

I Am Almost Sure To Be Blotted Out By Death, But Sometimes I Think It Is Not Impossible That I May Continue To Live In Some Other Manner After My Physical Death . Or, As Hamlet Wonders, What Dreams Will Come When We Leave This Body?

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.

In Our Dreams (writes Coleridge) Images Represent The Sensations We Think They Cause; We Do Not Feel Horror Because We Are Threatened By A Sphinx; We Dream Of A Sphinx In Order To Explain The Horror We Feel.

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

It Means Much To Have Loved, To Have Been Happy, To Have Laid My Hand On The Living Garden, Even For A Day.

A System Is Nothing More Than The Subordination Of All Aspects Of The Universe To Any One Of Such Aspects.

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

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

No One Is A Poet From Eight To Twelve And From Two To Six. Whoever Is A Poet Is One Always, And Continually Assaulted By Poetry.

Truly Fine Poetry Must Be Read Aloud. A Good Poem Does Not Allow Itself To Be Read In A Low Voice Or Silently. If We Can Read It Silently, It Is Not A Valid Poem: A Poem Demands Pronunciation. Poetry Always Remembers That It Was An Oral Art Before It Was A Written Art. It Remembers That It Was First Song.

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.

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

The Aesthetic Event Is Something As Evident, As Immediate, As Indefinable As Love, The Taste Of Fruit, Of Water. We Feel Poetry As We Feel The Closeness Of A Woman, Or As We Feel A Mountain Or A Bay. If We Feel It Immediately, Why Dilute It With Other Words, Which No Doubt Will Be Weaker Than Our Feelings?

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

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.

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

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.

It Only Takes Two Facing Mirrors To Build A Labyrinth.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

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.

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

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

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, I Don't Think In Either Thing. I Think About Expressing What I Want To Say. I Try To Do It In The Simplest Way Possible.

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

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.

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

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

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.

There Is No Intellectual Exercise Which Is Not Ultimately Useless.

A . . . Poet Is A Discoverer Rather Than An Inventor.

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.

I Think That The Reader Should Enrich What He Is Reading. He Should Misunderstand The Text; He Should Change It Into Something Else.

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

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.

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.

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