"Time has taught me a few tricks --

avoiding synonyms, the drawback to which is that they suggest imaginary differences . . . inserting circumstantial details, which are now demanded by readers, into my stories; feigning a slight uncertainty, since even though reality is precise, memory isn't; narrating events (this I learned from Kipling and the Icelandic sagas) as though I didn't fully understand them; remembering that tradition, conventions, 'the rules,' are not an obligation, and that time will surely repeal them -- but such tricks (or habits) are most certainly not an aesthetics" (from a Borges Foreword).