“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
More from Jorge Luis Borges on Writing
“I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.”
“All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare”
“The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.”
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”
“There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.”
“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
“When a writer dies, he becomes his books.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”