“If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.”

“... but some say that reality is what happens inside a writer's head, and it is fiction which takes place outside it.”

“I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.”

“Books are the reality you get to choose; life is the reality you hide from inside a book.”

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”

“Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.”