Quotes About Borges

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.

So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.

We can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.

La ya avanzada edad me ha enseñado la resignación de ser Borges

La realidad poética puede caber en una copla lo mismo que en un verso virgiliano.

Un atributo de lo infernal es la irrealidad, un atributo que parece mitigar sus terrores y que los agrava tal vez.

Haiku'yu biliyorum, iki üç hecede Bir an?, bir yank?y?, bir esriyiÅŸi yakalayan.

despertaba ese incompatible rencor que sólo causan la inteligencia, la gracia y la pedantería francesas [...]

Quain se arrepintió del orden ternario y predijo que los hombres que lo imitaran optarían por el binario y los demiurgos y los dioses por el infinito: infinitas historias, infinitamente ramificadas.

Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it.

That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

Lo que me interesa señalar en el bellísimo final de «Trön...» es algo que encontraremos en muchos otros textos de Borges: la lectura como defensa. La quietud a la que alude la hipálage está en el acto de leer; todo queda en suspenso; la vida, por fin, se ha detenido.

Patriotism, that least discerning of pas

I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.

There's a poem by Borges that begins, Ya no es mágico el mundo. Te han dejado . The world's not magical anymore. You've been left. He says left , an everyday word, a word that makes no noise.

My friend you must understand that time forks perpetually into countless futures. And in at least one of them I have become your enemy. Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)

My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

One should read Borges more.