A Rediscovered Interview with Borges

The Los Angeles Review of Books recently posted a rediscovered interview with the late great Jorge Luis Borges.

Here is an excerpt:

You said once you wished you had never left your father’s library, where you spent your time as a child.

Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. I’m still there. And here. I keep on reading the same books I read as a boy. Every time I read them they change. And they’re changing me, of course.

At home, I haven’t got a single book of mine, nor a single book written about me. I hardly know what I have written. I read other and better writers. If I reread my own stuff, I might be disheartened. I want to go on writing. I don’t want to be discouraged.

How do you write now?

I keep on dreaming, scheming, planning all the time. People come, I dictate to them. It’s the only thing I can do. I work in a very scattered way. I have no method. A haphazard way. Everything about me is haphazard.

I do my best to write in a simple style. I do my best to use the simple words. I do my best to watch the dictionary. I think my writing is, on the surface, simple. I feel a kind of inner need, an urge to do it. And I live to satisfy that need, and it keeps on worrying me, and when I write it down, I don’t worry about it.

Read the rest  at the LARB site.