I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head.

As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.

Fantasy filled his mind from everything that he read in the books - enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, flirtations, love affairs, misfortunes and impossible nonsense. As a result, he came to believe that all those fictitious adventures he was reading about were true, and for him there was no history more authentic in the world.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.

His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

I could live almost completely in imagination.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

I believed in childhood by authority, in youth by sentiment, in my mature years by reason; now I believe because I have always believed.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.