One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
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.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
I like nonsense—it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope… and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.
—Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) (1904–91) American Children’s Books Writer, Writer, Cartoonist, Animator
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1934–2002) American Journalist, Essayist, Memoirist, Travel Writer
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.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
When a fantasy turns you on, you’re obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.
—Stewart Brand (b.1938) American Writer, Editor
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
—Iris Murdoch (1919–99) British Novelist, Playwright, Philosopher
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.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
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