I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.
I don’t think there’s any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
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.
I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.
I don’t think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.
When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer – if there is any afterlife – to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.
I’m not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l’m really interested in the stuff he’s turning out.
I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked.
I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don’t think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.
I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any.
A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. 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.
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
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.
A writer always begins by being too complicated – he’s playing at several games at once.
If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.