Borges Quotes - Page 2

• It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

  Joshua Foer

  Writing, Thinking, Essence

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.36, Penguin

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• One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

  John Barth

  Teaching, Two, Bird

  Boston Sunday Globe, November 02, 2008.

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• Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

  Edward Abbey

  Style, Technique, Sake

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.33, RosettaBooks

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• Nazi Literature in the Americas, a wicked invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right litterateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth, and the great lost hope.

  Stacey D'Erasmo

  Son, Knives, Wicked

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• I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Our World, Long

  ""Mr g," by Alan Lightman". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. January 24, 2012.

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• For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Alberto Manguel (2006). “With Borges”, Telegram Books

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• One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.

  Peter Greenaway

  War, Book, Hero

  Interview in Art and Design, no. 49,

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• The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

  August Wilson

  Four, Influence, Has Beens

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• I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.

  Lee Klein

  Writing, Literature, Online

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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