Top 40 Quotes About Borges Writing
#1. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#2. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#3. Poetry is given to the poet. I don't think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#4. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#5. Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me
and treating me badly.
Jorge Luis Borges
#6. When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#8. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#9. I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
Paul Auster
#11. Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.
Paulo Coelho
#12. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#13. Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Jorge Luis Borges
#15. The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ...
Jorge Luis Borges
#16. For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.
Alberto Manguel
#17. A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
Jorge Luis Borges
#18. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#21. I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.
Jorge Luis Borges
#22. If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.
Jorge Luis Borges
#23. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#24. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#25. A writer always begins by being too complicated - he's playing at several games at once.
Jorge Luis Borges
#26. When people write in favor or against anybody, that hardly helps or hurts them ... man can be done or undone by his own writing, not by what other people say of him.
Jorge Luis Borges
#27. 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?
Jorge Luis Borges
#30. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#31. In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.
Jorge Luis Borges
#32. Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.
Jorge Luis Borges
#33. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#34. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#35. My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.
John Hodgman
#37. [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Sandra Cisneros
#39. I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
Jorge Luis Borges
#40. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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