Jorge Luis Borges

"Fear is the original curse."

"In my experience, the only things worth writing about are those which have been lived."

"The strange thing about my life is that I have never known which version of myself was real."

"You cannot be someone else. You are always yourself."

"To define is to exclude and negate."

"A writer has not the right to rewrite another's words if he is not absolutely sure of improving them."

"The metaphor is not an ornament of language but something much more profound."

"Time is the substance from which I am made."

"All things are words of some tongue that the gods speak in whispers."

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to."

"I believe that one should not try to avoid one's destiny."

"We live for the instant."

"In fact, all writing is an act of the memory."

"Every book is an instrument of propaganda."

"We should consider the problem of insincerity - the insincerity of the man who discovers a truth but does not tell it."

"Perhaps the history of the instruments that mankind has used is the history of mankind."

"The notion that I am myself is an old and a strange notion."

"If I had to name a book that will go on living, I would say Cervantes' Don Quixote."

"Reading, they did, is a privilege."

"I think of myself as a kind of hack, and I think of Schopenhauer and Plato as the real philosophers."

"The night, like the day, like the month, like the year, is a symbol of something."

"To be a novelist is to be a person who enjoys a kind of immortality."

"One thing does not exclude another."

"I have committed the common crime of giving vent to despair."

"The idea of a destiny is the central theme of my work."

"We are condemned to be free."

"Words are words; deeds are deeds."

"In any book, every word is sacred."

"The sea is a collective image of the world because it is so big and so ample and because we don't know it."

"Poetry is not what the verse is; it is what the verse says."