Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world...

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you...

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Understand, it’s never been easy to live, when we’re trying to escape ourselves.

I love stories that suck you in, that you can’t stop reading because you are quite simply there.

I fantasize about making reality better.

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place...

It may be escapist, but if I have a choice between watching the news or reading a book which gets me to see the world through different eyes, I will always choose the latter!

So many bad things have happened to them that they can’t trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

I have spent so many nights out under the starsEuphoria running through my veins and alcohol coursing through my bloodMy mind would race along with my heartMy vision drawn to the stars and all the...

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on–a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills,...

Rural and traditional escapism. That’s my angle. Places and events where we are free to relax and be ourselves, where nobody tells us to hurry along or conform or grow up. Somewhere we can properly...

The best-trained part of us, though, is the mouth, it �is always obediently and devoutly shut. And it’s only too true: an open mouth is a yawning fact, the fact that its owner is dwelling...

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.”...

I’m sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!””You will...

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or...

Don’t judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do.

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million...

Leaving the rat race is easy. All you have to do is quit your job, sell your house, and go and live in a tent in the middle of nowhere. It’s staying out of the...

I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And...

There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape...

The supposed reality of misfiring synapses, chemical imbalances, frontal lobe anomalies and the like – did not sway her desire for escape into an alternate universe – where she could discover fascinating things about her...

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been,...

Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My...

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.

Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They’re fairy tales for grown-ups.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the...

There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more...

The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she...

People talk– they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always...

…When people lose their way and lack a real purpose for living they often fall back on certain forms of escapism as a form of self-soothing…

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked...

Jimi Hendrix’s music was escapism.

To hide away from the world whose loveless heart has gone astrayand its inhabitants what could be a safer place than my imagination?

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet … and yet …Inside this little world they...

We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place...

Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else’s fantasy isn’t nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.

[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable...

Träume und Märchen waren ihr eigentlicher Lebensinhalt, dachte ich jetzt. Deshalb hat sie sich auch umgebracht, dachte ich, weil ein Mensch, der nur Träume und Märchen sich zu seinem Lebensinhalt gemacht hat, in dieser Welt...

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.

Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea...

Tant que mes jambes me permettent de fuir, tant que mes bras me permettent de combattre, tant que l’expérience que j’ai du monde me permet de savoir ce que je peux craindre ou désirer, nulle...

Religion is a non-alcoholic man’s alcohol. Alcohol is a non-religious man’s religion.

I want to glide in a world of beauty,’ I said. ‘To be carried away into a world of luxurious things.