Quote collection
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"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."
"Im merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader."
"I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me."
"Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library."
"There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her."
"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."
"To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity."
"The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral."
"There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once."
"Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men."
"In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense."
"In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them."
"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."
"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."
"Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing."
"You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber."
"I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters."
"Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life."
"The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men."
"As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel."