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"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
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"A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me."

"If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be."

"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."

"It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it."

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."

"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."

"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

"Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts."

"A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work."
Explore more quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

"The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; "tout aboutit en un livre, everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different."

"And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird."

"In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects."

"We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods."

"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."
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