"I suppose he had the good luck to be executed, no? I had an hour's chat with him in Buenos Aires. He struck me as a kind of play actor, no? Living up to a certain role. I mean, being a professional Andalusian... But in the case of Lorca, it was very strange because I lived in Andalusia and the Andalusians aren't a bit like that. His were stage Andalusians. Maybe he thought that in Buenos Aires he had to live up to that character, but in Andalusia, people are not like that. In fact, if you are in Andalusia, if you are talking to a man of letters and you speak to him about bullfights, he'll say, 'Oh well, that sort of this pleases people, I suppose, but really the torero works in no danger whatsoever. Because they are bored by these things, because every writer is bored by the local color in his own country. Well, when I met Lorca, he was being a professional Andalusian... Besides, Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very troubled about a very important figure in the contemporary world. A character in whom he could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who was this character and it turned out this character was Mickey Mouse. I suppose he was trying to be clever. And I thought, 'That's the kind of thing you say when you are very, very young and you want to astonish somebody.' But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way. But when he started in about Mickey Mouse being a symbol of America, there was a friend of mine there and he looked at me and I looked at him and we both walked away because we were too old for that kind of game, no? Even at that time."
More by Jorge Luis Borges
See allResonant Thoughts
"We all felt happy and excited because it was Diwali. My mother had saved lot of small coins from her shopping and gave them to me to buy crackers Stuffed full with sweets and feeling that life was gra…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"The sunflower keeps its eye on the sun with its back turned to the shade. We die facing life with our backs…"
— Malcolm de Chazal"Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the w…"
— Georges Bataille"Living Einstein at the Max Planck Institute"
— Albert Einstein"This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, …"
— Francis Bacon"In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject into, not four, but five grand elements:…"
— Harriet Beecher Stowe"On MySpace … the whole demographic of the stand-up comedy fan has changed. It's like an indie band thing. P…"
— Jim Gaffigan