Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.

The remark elevates reading over writing as the deeper measure of a literary life. Borges—who often framed himself as a reader first—suggests that intellectual formation, imagination, and even originality are nourished by absorption and re-creation of what one has read, not by sheer output. The contrast also critiques vanity in literary production: page counts can be a hollow metric, while a life of attentive reading implies humility, curiosity, and participation in a larger tradition. Implicitly, it treats literature as a conversation across time, where the reader’s inner library may matter more than the author’s bibliography.