DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction insofar as we are all, each and every one of us, including yours truly, and including you (perhaps most of all), works of fiction. Beyond that, it is pure and absolute nonfiction; and though its “author” technically never existed, at least not in the dense, empirical, flesh-and-blood sense, the personages and events herein depicted are drawn straight from life, as it were. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places, living or dead, while purely coincidental from the point of view of intention, should surprise no one.
- Sol Luckman
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
- Iris Murdoch
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we to play of imagination is incalculable.
- Carl Jung
You wish to see the distant realms? Very well. But know this first, the places you will visit, the places you will see, do not exist. For there are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this one, worlds of the human imagination. Their reality, or lack of reality is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?"
- Neil Gaiman
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
- Evan Walker
Everyone must have a fantasy.
- Andy Warhol
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
- Maya Angelou
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
- Carl Jung
To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
- Robert Heinlein
All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.
- Max Beerbohm
When we are narcissistic, we are not on solid ground (earth) or thinking clearly (air) or cought up in passion (fire). Somehow if we follow the myth, we are dreamlike, fluid, not clearly formed, more immersed in a stream of fantasy than secure in a firm identity.
- Thomas Moore
In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.
- Nora Ephron
True love 's the gift which
God has given
To man alone beneath the heaven:
It is not fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes soon as granted fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind.
- Sir Walter Scott
If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.
- Fran Lebowitz
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
- Lionel Trilling
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
- Albert Einstein
