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If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.

Jorge Luis Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: August 24
Died: 1986
Died: March 26
Librarian
Literary Critic
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges
Chorche Louis Borches
Jorge Luis Borges Acevedo
Horhe Luis Borhes
J. L. Borges
H. Bustos Domecq
Khorkhe Luyis Borkhes
Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
Believe
Disbelieves
Hardly
Expect
Worship
Reader
Writer
Writing

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
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You don't have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don't think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.
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Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
Jorge Luis Borges
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If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Jorge Luis Borges
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You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
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Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
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Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don't think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don't like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
Jorge Luis Borges
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What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
Jorge Luis Borges
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Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I don't think I can really believe in doomsday I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality.
Jorge Luis Borges
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All writing is dreaming
Jorge Luis Borges
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I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text he should change it into something else.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Jorge Luis Borges
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As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.
Jorge Luis Borges
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No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
Jorge Luis Borges