Jorge Luis Borges

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

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.

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

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?