Jorge Luis Borges Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• A writer's work is the product of laziness.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Laziness, Products

• Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dream, Writing

  Jorge Luis Borges (1978). “Doctor Brodie's Report”, Plume Books

• 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.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Believe, Writing

  "Twenty-four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981-1983". Book by Roberto Alifano, 1984.

• The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Language, Made

• Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Hippie, Reading, Writing

  Jorge Luis Borges (2001). “A Universal History of Iniquity”, Penguin Books

• 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

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  "The Garden of Forking Paths". Book by Jorge Luis Borges, 1942.

• Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Book, Writing, Criticism

  Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger (2009). “Seven Nights”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

• A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Should Have, Rejection

  Jorge Luis Borges (2013). “Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.9, Melville House

• What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Doe, Want

• I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Mean, Minorities

  Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, Jorge Luis Borges, Anglo-Argentine Society (1988). “In memory of Borges”, Not Avail

• I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Simple, Earth

  Jorge Luis Borges (2005). “Brodie's Report: Including the Prose Fiction from In Praise of Darkness”, Penguin Classics

• All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Literature

• Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Past, Polemics

  "Kafka and His Precursors" (1951) (translation by James E. Irby)

• 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.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Thinking, Voice

• At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Real, Writing, Maturity

• 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

  Loneliness, Writing, Dreamer

• 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

  Twilight, Writing, Past

  Jorge Luis Borges (1964). “Dreamtigers”, p.43, University of Texas Press

• Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Achievement, Asking

  Jorge Luis Borges, Donald A. Yates, James East Irby (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.90, New Directions Publishing

• We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Thinking, Years

• The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Writing, Ephemeral

  Jorge Luis Borges (2000). “Brodie's report: including the prose fiction from In praise of darkness”

• The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Causality, Problem

  "Discussion". Book by Jorge Luis Borges, 1932.

• I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dream, Book, Writing

  Jorge Luis Borges (1962). “Ficciones”, p.81, Grove Press

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Mind

  Source: 4chanlit.wikia.com

• I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Burgin (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.82, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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

  Writing, Stories, Patterns

  Jorge Luis Borges (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.76, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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