Best Borges Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“Borges was unapologetically smart and equally sentimental; a proto-geek, blind to distinctions between low pulp fiction and high criticism, experimental but never arch, and always playful, with a humor as dry as dust.”

Fiction Smart Lows Criticism Blind Dust Dry Distinction Sentimental Geek Arches Pulp Borges

Author:John Hodgman

“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.”

Writing Willing Jokes Superhero Borges

Author:John Hodgman

“The bacillus of efficiency has also attacked football, and some dare to ask what's the point in playing well. I feel tempted to tell about the time they dared to ask Borges what is poetry for, to which he answered: 'What is a sunrise for? What are caresses for? What is the smell of coffee for?'”

Feels Wells Asks Football Dare Smell Coffee Efficiency Sunrise Tempted Caress Borges What Is Poetry

Author:Jorge Valdano

“I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.”

Writing Kind Joy Boys Demonic Borges Allan Poe

Author:Paul Auster

“When I use a name or place, I want to leave the reader open to the waterfall of determinacy that it may provoke. And I don't know, but I must mention the name Borges. I try to mention it in every one of my works. It's a mark, a stamp, a sort of homage to Argentinidad. But it's an homage that works through pat phrases, those stock images that populate his work: the night, labyrinths, libraries. That is, I don't want simply to pay homage to Borges, but rather the contrary: to recall his commonplaces.”

Knows Want Trying May Use Night Names Pay Reader Mark Library Contrary Phrases Working It Recalls Provoking Stamps Commonplace Labyrinth Homage Waterfalls Borges

Author:Sergio Chejfec

“I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.”

People Looks Book Stories Wealth Influence Kings Incredibles Latin Latin America Persian Gabriel American Writer Borges Latin American Surrealist

Author:Porochista Khakpour

“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.”

Firsts Book Whole Half Beats Bars Checks Joyce Borges Bar Mitzvah Mitzvah

Author:Simon Rich

“Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.”

Fiction Influence Strange University Genre Discovering Power Of Love Blake Joyce Borges Lovecraft Yeats Jeter Pinter

Author:Hal Duncan

“I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.”

Writing Wells Littles Book Remember Fiction Taken Poet University Collections Texas Fiction Writers Austin Borges University Of Texas

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“[Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.”

Writing Trying Stories Middle Hearing Short Story Fables Borges

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping.”

Knows Littles Long Made Ends Dream Lasts Beautiful Lines Pieces Glasses Prose Tigers Crystals Borges Ping Reverberation

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem when he was in his 80s about one day writing the book that would justify him. This was long after he had become one of the great masters, a writer everyone looks up to and reveres. As artists, I don't think we ever see ourselves as done. We always think we're at the beginning . . .”

Thinking Writing Looks Long Book Done Artist Masters One Day Look Up Justify 80s Borges

Author:Theodora Goss

“I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.”

People Different Lists Fascinated Quotations Borges

Author:Susan Sontag

“I'm educating myself more about world poetry. I know a lot about contemporary American poetry, so I felt I needed to learn more about figures like Borges, Akhmatova, Neruda, etc. I felt I needed a bigger lens to see poetry through. It really helps to see poetry as a world language, and not just something American.”

Knows World Helping Language Felt Figures Needed Bigger Contemporary Etc Lenses Borges American Poetry

Author:Allison Joseph

“I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.”

Writing Literature Heavy Genre Online Milton Borges

Author:Lee Klein

“I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.”

Way Different Sound Kings Storytelling Code Different Ways Borges Balzac Gaiman

Author:Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

People Love Said Two Stories Three Power Struggle Four Love Story Ads Voyages Borges

Author:Paulo Coelho

“To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)”

“We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.”

Knows Way Long Age Parent Changed Mets Long Time Lifetime Realms Plus Dozen Ancestor Riding Imaginary Arthur Enchantment Argentina Borges Shire

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin

“One should read Borges more.”

Should Borges

Author:Roberto Bolano

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?”

World Ends Names Space Sea Land Pages Visible Makers Blank Alphabet Ribbons Capes Saturated Blank Pages Borges Harbour Coastline

Author:Georges Perec

“It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.”

Thinking World Writing Humans Remember Forget Essence Make Sense Filters Borges

Book:Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Source: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.”

Way Two Remember Teaching Missing Students Ought Bird Swim 1960s Borges Two Birds

Author:John Barth

“Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.”

Too Much Style Sake Technique Betray Felicity Joyce Borges

Book:A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

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

Age Taught Resignation Borges

Author:Jorge Luis Borges

“He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)”

“Nazi Literature in the Americas, a wicked invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right litterateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth, and the great lost hope.”

Ifs Literature Lost Son Wicked Knives Imaginary Nazi Fascists Woven Encyclopedia Borges Lost Hope Sardonic

Author:Stacey D'Erasmo

“I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.”

World Feels Writing Long Interesting Fiction Magic Long Time Our World Exploring Imaginative Realist Time Love Borges Rushdie Marquez

Author:Alan Lightman

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