Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

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.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

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

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

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.

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

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

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

Art is fire plus algebra.

I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don't think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.