Cesare Pavese Quotes

I believe in illusion - I don't believe in magic.

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

The dreamer's untamed eye sees beyond the illusions to the heart of what is real.

Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

I'm not here now. This isn't happening. You're just visiting a dream of mine.

The world's like a ride in a fairground & when you choose to go on it you think it's real, that's how powerful our minds are

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.