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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.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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It Is Worth Remembering

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 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.

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Life And Death Have Been Lacking In My Life.

I Have Known Uncertainty: A State Unknown To The Greeks.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

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

Writing Is Nothing More Than A Guided Dream.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

The Mind Was Dreaming. The World Was Its Dream.

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

It Only Takes Two Facing Mirrors To Build A Labyrinth.

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.

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.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

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.

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.

It Seemed Incredible To Me That Day Without Premonitions Or Symbols Should Be The One Of My Inexorable Death .

I Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

I Cannot Sleep Unless I Am Surrounded By Books.

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.

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.

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

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

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

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.

In All Fiction, When A Man Is Faced With Alternatives He Chooses One At The Expense Of Others.

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

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.

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

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

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

Falling In Love

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

That One Individual Should Awaken In Another Memories That Belong To Still A Third Is An Obvious Paradox.

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.

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

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.

Fame Is A Form, Perhaps The Worst Form, Of Incomprehension.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

A Writer Should Have Another Lifetime To See If He's Appreciated.

Literature Is Not Exhaustible, For The Sufficient And Simple Reason That A Single Book Is Not.

Then He Reflected That Reality Does Not Usually Coincide With Our Anticipation Of It; With A Logic Of His Own He Inferred That To Forsee A Circumstantial Detail Is To Prevent Its Happening. Trusting In This Weak Magic, He Invented, So That They Would Not Happen, The Most Gruesome Details.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

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.

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 Ask Of Any God, Of Any Gods, That If They Give Immortality, I Hope To Be Granted Oblivion Also.

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

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

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.

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.

The Time For Your Labor Has Been Granted.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You Have Wakened Not Out Of Sleep, But Into A Prior Dream, And That Dream Lies Within Another, And So On, To Infinity, Which Is The Number Of Grains Of Sand. The Path That You Are To Take Is Endless, And You Will Die Before You Have Truly Awakened.

The Art Of Writing Is Mysterious, The Opinions We Hold Are Ephemeral.

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

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

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.

So Plant Your Own Gardens And Decorate Your Own Soul, Instead Of Waiting For Someone To Bring You Flowers.

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.

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

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.

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

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

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?

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

Reality Favors Symmetry.

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.

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

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.

Death Is Just Infinity Closing In.

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.

I Gazed At Every Mirror On The Planet, Not One Gave Back My Reflection.

Self Improvement

Reality May Avoid The Obligation To Be Interesting, But ... Hypotheses May Not.

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.

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 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.

Besides, Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts.

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

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

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

I Have Always Come To Life After Coming To Books.

Democracy Is An Abuse Of Statistics.

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.

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.

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

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.

If A Writer Disbelieves What He Is Writing, Then He Can Hardly Expect His Reader To Believe It.

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.

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.

The Truth Is That We Live Out Our Lives Putting Off All That Can Be Put Off; Perhaps We All Know Deep Down That We Are Immortal And That Sooner Or Later All Men Will Do And Know All Things.

Procrastination

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

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

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.

The Possibilities Of The Art Of Combination Are Not Infinite, But They Tend To Be Frightful.

All Writing Is Dreaming

There Is No Intellectual Exercise Which Is Not Ultimately Useless.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nothing Is Built On Stone; All Is Built On Sand, But We Must Build As If The Sand Were Stone.

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

I Foresee That Man Will Resign Himself Each Day To More Atrocious Undertakings; Soon There Will Be No One But Warriors And Brigands; I Give Them This Counsel: The Author Of An Atrocious Undertaking Ought To Imagine That He Has Already Accomplished It, Ought To Impose Upon Himself A Future As Irrevocable As The Past.

Poetry Springs From Something Deeper; It's Beyond Intelligence.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Art Is Endless Like A River Flowing, Passing, Yet Remaining.

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

Creativity Is Suspended Between Memory And Forgetting.

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

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Only In The Present Do Things Happen.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

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

Your Unforgivable Sins Do Not Allow You To See My Splendor.

Unforgivable Sin

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

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

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

Canada Is So Far Away It Hardly Exists.

I Am Interested In The Past. Perhaps One Of The Reasons Is We Cannot Make, Cannot Change The Past. I Mean You Can Hardly Unmake The Present. But The Past After All Is Merely To Say A Memory, A Dream. You Know My Own Past Seems Continually Changed When I Am Remembering It, Or Reading Things That Are Interesting To Me.

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.

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely.

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)

Time Is The Substance Of Which We Are Made

I Never Reread What I've Written. I'm Far Too Afraid To Feel Ashamed Of What I've Done.

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.

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 Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

Censorship Is The Mother Of Metaphor.

The Two Important Facts I Should Say, Are Emotion, And Then Words Arising From Emotion. I Don't Think You Can Write In An Emotionless Way. If You Attempt It, The Result Is Artificial. I Don't Like That Kind Of Writing. I Think That If A Poem Is Really Great, You Should Think Of It As Having Written Itself Despite The Author. It Should Flow.

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.

Islam Asserts That On The Unappealable Day Of Judgment Every Perpetrator Of The Image Of A Living Creature Will Be Raised From The Dead With His Works, And He Will Be Commanded To Bring Them To Life, And He Will Fail, And Be Cast Out With Them Into The Fires Of Punishment.

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.

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

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.

Happy Are The Beloved And The Lovers And Those Who Can Live Without Love.

We Have A Very Precise Image - An Image At Times Shameless - Of What We Have Lost, But We Are Ignorant Of What May Follow Or Replace 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.

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.

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

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Roger Bannister

George A. Moore

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