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My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

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
Writer
Friends
Write
Tell
Quandary
Writing
Intruder
Really
Prose
Attempt
Poetry

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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This web of time--the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries--embrace every posibility.
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Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
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The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
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What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
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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.
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The time for your labor has been granted.
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As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.
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Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.
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The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
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In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.
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The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
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If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.
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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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I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
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What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
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We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
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I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.
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Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.
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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.
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