Borges: Selected Non-Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

“There is no whole self. It suffices to walk any distance along the inexo­rable rigidity that the mirrors of the past open to us in order to feel like out­siders, naively flustered by our own bygone days.”

In his earliest published essay, young Borges explores the self and what he calls “the nothingness of personality”:

Labyrinths

Jorge Luis Borges

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

A New Refutation of Time – Borges’s classic meditation on the most paradoxical dimension of existence:

Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges

Fernando Sorrentino

“When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.”

Borges on public opinion, literature vs. the other arts, and the true measure of artistic success:

The Book of Memory Gaps

Cecilia Ruiz

An illustrated meditation on memory and its imperfections, inspired by Borges:

Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges

Fernando Sorrentino

“A writer’s work is the product of laziness, you see. A writer’s work essentially consists of taking his mind off things, of thinking about something else, of daydreaming, of not being in any hurry to go to sleep but to imagine something … And then comes the actual writing, and that’s his trade. That is, I don’t think the two things are incompatible. Besides, I think that when one is writing something that’s more or less good, one doesn’t feel it to be a chore; one feels it to be a form of amusement. A form of amusement that doesn’t exclude the use of intelligence.”

Borges on writing – collected wisdom from his most candid interviews: