Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 10

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

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.

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.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

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.

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 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.

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?

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

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.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.