--- Jose Luis Borges, Prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths, in Ficciones, edited and with an introduction by Anthony Kerrigan, Grove Press (New York), (1941, 1962:15)
The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.
