The variety of words is another error. All the academicians recommend it, I think, mistakenly. I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood. Nobody should dare to write “outskirts” without having spent hours pacing their high sidewalks; without having felt their walls, their lots, their moons just around the corner from a general store, like a cornucopia…. I have now conquered my poverty, recognizing among thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when Judgement Day arrives.
Simply: the page that, at dusk, upon the resolved truth of day’s end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing against the street, I would dare to read to a friend.
— Jorge Luis Borges, A Profession of Literary Faith
(via infinity-on-trial)
