Argentine author (1899-1986)
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
preface, Dr. Brodie's Report
Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote", Dreamtigers
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Immortal"
He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Aleph and Other Stories
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters, c. 1946
The reader accepts anything, no? Even the starkest nonsense.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Dead Men's Dialogue", Dreamtigers
Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote", The Garden of Forking Paths
We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", Other Inquisitions
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Funes El Memorioso", Ficciones
I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Dreamtigers
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw", Other Inquisitions
Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Universal History of Infamy