Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors.

Don't talk to me about justice. I'm a man of letters, not a judge.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

I am not sure that I exist, in fact. I am all the writers I have read, all the people I have met, all the women I have loved; all the cities I have visited, all the ancestors I have had.

I distrust all general ideas.

There are some people who are born to be unhappy, and I am one of them.

To be a man is to be an argument.

I don't write for posterity. I write for myself and for my friends.

Reality is not always probable, or even plausible.

I am an old man, and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

The fact is that we are all on a road to death, and I don't see why we should make such a fuss about it.

I have always felt that one doesn't have to be a genius to be a good writer. One only has to be honest.

I think that the state should be invisible.

To sleep is to be human. To wake is to be human. To dream is to be God.

I am not a philosopher. I am a man of letters. I am a man of words.

The future is inevitable. We cannot change it. We can only change how we react to it.

I have always been a timid man. I have always been afraid of everything.

I have read almost everything, and I have found nothing new.