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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.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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The People Of Tlön

Jorge Luis Borges

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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.

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Besides, Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Creativity Is Suspended Between Memory And Forgetting.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

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.

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

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

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.

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

Time Management

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Death Is Just Infinity Closing In.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

The Sea Is An Idiom I Cannot Decipher.

We Have Shared Out, Like Thieves, The Amazing Treasures Of Days And Nights.

The Time For Your Labor Has Been Granted.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely.

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.

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

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

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)

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

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 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Falling In Love

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

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

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.

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

Censorship Is The Mother Of Metaphor.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Time Forks Perpetually Toward Innumerable Futures.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

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

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.

If I Write A Fantastic Story, I'm Not Writing Something Willful. On The Contrary, I Am Writing Something That Stands For My Feelings, Or For My Thoughts. So That, In A Sense, A Fantastic Story Is As Real And Perhaps More Real Than A Mere Circumstantial Story. Because After All, Circumstances Come And Go, And Symbols Remain.

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

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

Like All Those Possessing A Library, Aurelian Was Aware That He Was Guilty Of Not Knowing His In Its Entirety.

Soccer Is Popular Because Stupidity Is Popular.

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.

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

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Original Is Unfaithful To The Translation.

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

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.

Writing Is Nothing More Than A Guided Dream.

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

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

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 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 Exercise Of The Intellect Which Is Not, In The Final Analysis, Useless. A Philosophical Doctrine Begins As A Plausible Description Of The Universe; With The Passage Of The Years It Becomes A Mere Chapter If Not A Paragraph Or A Name In The History Of Philosophy.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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 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, 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.

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

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

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.

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, 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Don't Talk Unless You Can Improve The Silence.

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

We Have Stopped Believing In Progress. What Progress That Is !

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

The Web Of Time - The Strands Of Which Approach One Another, Bifurcate, Intersect, Or Ignore Each Other Through The Centuries - Embraces "every" Possibility. We Do Not Exist In Most Of Them. In Some You Exist And Not I, While In Others I Do, And You Do Not, And In Yet Others Both Of Us Exist.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas.

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

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.

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

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

Time Is The Substance Of Which We Are Made

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

It's A Shame That We Have To Choose Between Two Such Second-rate Countries As The Ussr And The Usa.

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

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.

Everything Touches Everything.

It Only Takes Two Facing Mirrors To Build A Labyrinth.

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

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.

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