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)
Every writer creates his own precursors.
Blindness is not darkness, but light.
The world of literature is infinite.
I am a Jew who was converted to Catholicism, but I am also a Protestant, a Buddhist, a Mohammedan.
The act of writing is a form of self-exploration.
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the dreamed one awoke.
The I is a fiction.
Literature is a dream within a dream.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has only one worshipper.
The labyrinth is a symbol of the universe.
I have no personal memories; my memories are the memories of others.
The only miracle is that we are all happy.
Words are the source of misunderstandings.
The history of literature is the history of the human soul.
I am not a man; I am literature.
The end of the tale is the beginning of another.
God is in the details, but the devil is in the library.
My last words? I don't know, perhaps 'Finally!'
To be is to be perceived.
Contemporaries of Jorge Luis Borges
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).