Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 13

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 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.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

I'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 try to avoid purple patches, fine writing, all that kind of thing... because I think they're a mistake. And then sometimes it comes through and sometimes it doesn't, but that's not up to me. It's up to chance.

I 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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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?

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

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 don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

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.

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.

The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.

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.

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

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.

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.

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.