in jorge luis borges' foreward to 'fictions' :

"[...] It is a laborious madness and an impoverished one, the madness of composing vasts books--setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. [...]"
- Jorge Luis Borges*

* As translated by Andrew Hurley in "Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges" (Penguin, 1999), p. 67.

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/m