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Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Jorge Luis Borges

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ease Friendship Minority Myself Time Writing
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Missing Value Yourself
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Decoration Flower Garden Plant Self Love Soul Yourself
When you reach my age, you realize you couldn’t have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Age Better Place Reach Worst Yourself
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expression Important Literature
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Embarrassment Fortune Improvement Ourselves
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Discover Fact Library Poetry
Death is just infinity closing in.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Close Death Infinite
Every man should be capable of all ideas.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Capable Ideas Man
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

Belief Celebration Direct Expression Fight State
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Disguise Movie People Photograph Stranger
A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Aspect System Universe
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Earth Mirror Myself Reflection See
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Flattery Poster Worth
Reality favors symmetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Reality Symmetry
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Writing

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

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Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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