Hubert Selby Jr. Quotes

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

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.

Reality doesn't interest me.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Movies are different from real life.

Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.

I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Words, as is well known, are the greatest foes of reality.

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

People don't like reality, they like crazy stories.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?