"At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his 'nobodiness' might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to: he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imaging other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caeser, who ignores the admonition of the Sybil, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters."

—Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing from The Maker (1960), trans. Andrew Hurley