Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Only in the present do things happen.

Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful.

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

You don't have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don't think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.