And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.
It is a fiction, a shade, a nonentity, but a reality for legal purposes. A corporation aggregate is only in abstracto—it is invisible, immortal, and rests only in intendment and consideration of the law.
I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.
I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
How could she have believed such an artificial life as the theatre was suitable?
Sometimes I wish I were a character in a book and there was a writer out there giving me things to say.
You may be real, but you're still stuck in a book.
