Jorge Luis Borges
Master of metaphysical fiction and labyrinths
Most quoted
"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."
— from Interview with Richard Burgin, 1967
"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."
— from Epilogue to 'The Maker', 1960
"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."
— from The Garden of Forking Paths, 1944
All quotes by Jorge Luis Borges (325)
I have always been interested in the idea of the dream.
The world is a song, and we are the singers.
I am a man who has read many books.
The past is a lesson, and we are the students.
The world is a game, and we are the players.
I am a man who has written many words.
The future is a journey, and we are the travelers.
I have always been interested in the idea of the infinite.
The world is a story, and we are the characters.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
A man sets himself deliberately to imagine other conditions, other worlds.
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment in which a man knows forever more who he is.
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
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.
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last forever.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
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.
In the critic's mind, the book is read, written, reviewed, and then finally judged.
Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind.
Contemporaries of Jorge Luis Borges
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).