Jorge Luis Borges

"Imagination is The Thing, I should say. It's far more important than physical courage. To write you need imagination and emotion, feeling. …

When I write I try to be true not to things actually happening but to my particular dream at the time. I know that the reader feels it in that way. If the reader feels that a writer is lying, he lays down the book. If the reader feels that the dream is a response to a real dream then he goes on reading. That's the way I think that literature is made - by sincere dreaming."

In Memory of Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, ed.
London: Constable, 1988.