Borges

"The idea of fame was alien to the Buenos Aires of my youth…. I remember having read that Emily Dickinson said that publishing was no part of a writer's destiny or career. She never published. And we all thought the same way and along the same lines. We were not writing for a minority, for a majority, or for the public. We wrote to please ourselves and to please our friends perhaps. Or perhaps we wrote because we stood in need of getting rid of some idea. Alfonso Reyes, the great Mexican writer, said to me: We publish in order not to go on emending rough drafts. And I know he was right. We publish to be rid of a book, to forget it. Once the book has appeared, then we lost all interest in it." - Jorge Luis Borges, 'Borges at Eighty: Conversations'