“I found that being pregnant was different from how I thought it would be…It shares a lot in common with writing in a way. You have an imaginary version of yourself pregnant, and an imaginary baby, an imaginary idea of yourself as a mother…”

“Everyone has imaginary ideas of himself as being this or that sort of person. And you can be sure that the images are highly complimentary! But since they are purely imaginary, they are highly sensitive to assault by reality.”

“I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.”

“Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.”

“It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.”

“One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.”

“The first thing that begins to happen when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer is this imaginary writer’s block that people talk about, but I never really suffered from. But there’s this barrier between the spoken word and the written word, once you set something down in writing it’s supposed to be set in stone or you take on this funny attitude that writing is unnatural…”

“This miracle of analysis, this marvel of the world of ideas, an almost amphibian object between Being and Non-being that we call the imaginary number.”

“First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is.”

“All novels… are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”