“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-1983 (1983)
Jorge Luis Borges spent decades weaving philosophy, myth, and imagination into some of the most quietly radical fiction of the twentieth century. His labyrinths and libraries were not escapes from life but transformations of it, which is perhaps why his thoughts on the relationship between experience and art carry such weight.
In a series of conversations with journalist Roberto Alifano between 1981 and 1983, Borges spoke with the candor that comes late in a long life. By then he had lived through personal heartbreak, political exile, and decades of near-blindness, a condition that forced him to compose entirely in his mind before dictating to others. He knew difficulty not as an abstraction but as a daily companion.
What he offers here is not a romantic consolation but something more practical and more demanding. He asks us to see our worst moments not as interruptions to a creative life but as the very substance of one. The clay metaphor is deliberate and grounding: clay is unformed, sometimes cold, sometimes heavy, but it is never useless.
He extends this idea beyond artists to all people, which softens any sense of elitism and opens the thought to anyone who has ever wondered what their suffering was for. Borges does not promise answers, only a way of holding the question.
