The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

The mind can make substance, and people planets of its own with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.