Literary Birthday – 24 August – Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was born on 24 August 1899, and died on 14 June 1986.

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

1. Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
2. I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
3. I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
4. Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
5. We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
6. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
7. I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
8. 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.
9. We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.
10. The dictionary is based on the hypothesis — obviously an unproven one — that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

READ: 6 Bits Of Writing Advice From Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer of speculative fiction, essayist, poet, and translator. He is the author of The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory, Ficciones, and The Book of Imaginary Beings. He uses slipstream fiction techniques in his writing. Borges is a foundational figure in speculative fiction, known for blending reality with metaphysical puzzles. His short stories use motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. He and another writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares, jointly wrote detective stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. In 1961, Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. More honours over the years included a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, the Balzan Prize, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the French Legion of Honour, and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country. Borges was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature over 30 times.

Source for image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Borges_1921.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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