Two things to keep in mind.
Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to have written the second kind of book.
That’s from Lanark, but this, this was said by William Butler Yeats:
The visible world is merely their skin.
