[...] in his essay The Last Reader, Ricardo Piglia writes that "Borges's greatest lesson is perhaps the certainty that fiction doesn't only depend on the person who constructs it but also on the person who reads it." And he adds: "What is particular to Borges (if such a thing exists), is the capacity to read everything like a fiction and believe in its power. Fiction as a theory of reading."

[...] What makes Macedonio's story remarkable is how earnestly he wrestles with tigers that we all face. It isn't the felicity of his prose, or the prescience of his ideas -- though his prose is often felicitous and his ideas often prescient. Rather, it's the open heart with which he takes up his pen and seeks, through its wanderings, to find a way to love the sound of the kettle on the stove, the crumbled mate leaves on the tablecloth, the arrangement of the furniture in the room -- all the dull, pedestrian details of everyday life that clearly offer more irritation than fascination. And somewhere in these details, the tiny tinkerings that he inexhaustibly and minutely calibrates in every corner of his life, is the beloved. ANd in the beloved, in the other, there is passion, and death, and art, and eternity.

[...] Art is that which is written without knowing what will happen, and thus has to be written while docilely discovering and then resolving each situation, each problem of action or expression. [...]