When you're a kid you use the [pornographic playing] cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

Albee’s remark contrasts adolescent sexuality—often mediated through contraband images and imagined scenarios—with adult sexuality, which can become shaped by preexisting fantasies and scripts. The paradox is that the direction of substitution reverses: youth uses fantasy to stand in for experience, while maturity may use experience to reenact or approximate fantasy. Implicit is a critique of how desire is learned and rehearsed through representations, and how “real” encounters can be instrumentalized, treated as props for an inner narrative rather than as mutual, present experience. The line also fits Albee’s broader interest in self-deception and the ways people construct private fictions to manage anxiety, longing, and disappointment.