To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "The Meeting in a Dream," Other Inquisitions (1952).)

Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "The Nightingale of Keats," Other Inquisitions, University of Texas Press (1964).)

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "The Flower of Coleridge" ["La flor de Coleridge"], Other Inquisitions [Otras inquisiciones] (1952).)

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "The Wall and the Books" ["La muralla y los libros" (1950)], Other Inquisitions [Otras inquisiciones] (1952).)

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "Creation and P.H. Gosse" ["La creacin y P.H. Gosse"], Other Inquisitions [Otras inquisiciones] (1952).)

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"], Discussion [Discusi?n] (1932).)

Every writer "creates" his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. repr. In Other Inquisitions (1960, trans. 1964). Kafka and His Precursors (1951).)

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.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "Kafka and His Precursors" ["Kafka y sus precursores"], Other Inquisitions [Otras inquisiciones] (1952). Cf. also the essay on Hawthorne in the same volume, in which Borges says: "Wakefield" prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of "Wakefield." The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them.)

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "Narrative Art and Magic" ["El arte narrativo y la magia"] (1932), Discussion [Discusi?n] (1932).)

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.

(Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "Nathaniel Hawthorne," Other Inquisitions [Otras inquisiciones] (1952).)