One man's daydreaming is another man's novel.

The line draws a boundary-less continuum between private imagination and public art. What looks like idle “daydreaming” from the outside can be the raw material of narrative: a novelist’s work often begins as wandering thought, fantasy, or speculative reverie. The aphorism also implies a shift in perspective and value—one person dismisses an inner life as unproductive, while another recognizes it as creative capital. More broadly, it suggests that stories are not necessarily born from extraordinary events but from the capacity to shape ordinary mental drift into structured meaning that others can enter and share.