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“When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever. If you think of life as a dream, that is a thought, a thought that is real, or at least that most men are bound to have, no? “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
I think that’s better than the idea of shocking people, than finding connections between things that have never been connected before, because there is no real connection, so the whole thing is a kind of juggling.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translato (1899-1986), interviewed by Ronald Christ in July 1966, Jorge Luis Borges, The Art of Fiction No. 39, The Paris Review. (Photo source)
