Quotes & Sayings About Escapism

Entertainment is needed, and so I do think escapism is needed. — Ving Rhames

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. — Rebecca Mead

I think what makes Narnia a magical place is that it offers escapism - escapism from a world that is so different from the reality known by the characters and the reality known by the fans. — Will Poulter

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times. — Alan Moore

This particular book felt familiar, like an old friend. The characters drew me into their world, and I blocked out mine for the rest of the afternoon. — Rebecca Raisin

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan
the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness. — Alan Jacobs

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 you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you've escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in.
So no, they're not escapist. They're escape. — Neil Gaiman

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 anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. — Umberto Eco

I was a big fan of John Cassavetes, his wife, Gena Rowlands, and that era of filmmaking which was about realism and which represented the antithesis of the dreamy escapism you found in musicals. — Carmen Ejogo

As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity. — Douglas Coupland

Perhaps fantasy offers imaginative escapism more than other genres. — Jasper Fforde

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 into reality ... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality. — Arthur C. Clarke

The show is escapism. If you look back to when I was in college, all the girls in the sorority houses were gathered around watching soap operas. That was the escapism, the show that was giving you something you couldn't have. Now, you go into any sorority house, there are 50 to 100 girls piled in watching The Bachelor. We are the modern-day soap opera. — Chris Harrison

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We were miles away from our real lives. — Maggie Stiefvater

But I was always much more interested in reading fashion magazines than I was music magazines when I was a teenager. Just that sense of romanticism and escapism and the dream of it has always been quite alluring to me, as well as that sense of becoming a character through clothes. — Florence Welch

Current cant equates fantasy with escapism, and current fashion would have it that fantasy is both easy to read and to write. It isn't. When it is done honestly, by a skillful writer, fantasy takes us far enough beyond our daily perceptions to open us to the essential realities beneath it. This is the true goal of all art. — Ellen Kushner

Reader's Bill of Rights
1. The right to not read
2. The right to skip pages
3. The right to not finish
4. The right to reread
5. The right to read anything
6. The right to escapism
7. The right to read anywhere
8. The right to browse
9. The right to read out loud
10. The right to not defend your tastes — Daniel Pennac

I talk too much, but there's a lot unsaid. I've slept in a lot of beds. — Kris Kidd

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. — James Baldwin

That's what's great about show business. It's escapism. You pay your five bucks to get in and sit there and you're in another world. Forget about the problems in the world. It's wonderful. — Michael Jackson

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 never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home. — J. Maarten Troost

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 if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on! — Tennessee Williams

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism. — Kilroy J. Oldster

J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered - as it still is in many quarters - an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere "escapism." "Of course it is escapist," he cried. "That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape - and take as many with him as he can." He went on to explain, "The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible. — Stephen R. Lawhead

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? — Laura Miller

It's more like... It keeps the world out so I can be in my own thoughts. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

People love escapism and there should be a place for it. — Tom Hiddleston

For me, the value of a climb is the sum of three inseparable elements, all equally important: aesthetics, history, and ethics. Together they form the whole basis of my concept of alpinism. Some people see no more in climbing mountains than an escape from the harsh realities of modern times. This is not only uninformed but unfair. I don't deny that there can be an element of escapism in mountaineering, but this should never overshadow its real essence, which is not escape but victory over your own human frailty. — Walter Bonatti

Escapism is survival to me. — Johnny Depp

The fact that the public are mesmerised by Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and all these miserable people makes me laugh because those celebrities are more miserable than the people reading about them for escapism. — Corey Taylor

The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world. — Lily Cole

Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn't answer the thing that asked her to let it out
(let you out from where?
let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)
the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold. — Helen Oyeyemi

I am always writing a potpourri of music. I want to give the world escapism through the wonder of great music and to reach the masses. — Michael Jackson

All the time, I looked out our lattice window. I watched the birds fly by. I followed the clouds on their travels. I studied the moon as it grew larger, then shrank. So much happened outside my window that I almost forgot what was happening inside that room. — Lisa See

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [ ... ] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless. — Audrey Niffenegger

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, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality. — Neil Gaiman

Moreover, people have become accustomed to reading to escape as opposed to reading to think. — Leigh M. Lane

How would I like to be remembered? As a person who came and brought light to the world, some escapism. Also as the voice for the voiceless children, because I love them. — Michael Jackson

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 inner world - or where she could hide from the real world. — Kelly Proudfoot

You were trying to find a way to get rid of yourself,
but you were still left with your mouth. — Kris Kidd

Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can't help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that "it'll only make things worse" or "it's not gonna change anything", except, a lot of times, that's not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn't have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality. — Justin Allen

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 ... — John Geddes

Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven't met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you. — Katarina Bivald

Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours. — T.C. Boyle

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere — Karina Cooper

I withdraw my consent from reality. I deny it my assistance. I dedicate myself to the temptations of escapism, and throw myself wholeheartedly into the endlessness of unreality. — Ursula Poznanski

I just wanted to make a record that wasn't escapism. Like, I didn't want to write another record that was devoid of meaningful content. — Dan Deacon

A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs. — Wentworth Miller

Don't judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do. — Dan Pearce

I'm a collector of cartoons. All the Disney stuff, Bugs Bunny, the old MGM ones. It's real escapism, it's like everything's alright. It's like the world is happening now in a far away city. Everything's fine. — Michael Jackson

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. — Wally Lamb

Fashion is, after all, a form of escapism, and in fact people are buying more special things than ever, nowadays. They deny and deny themselves, and wait and wait, and then they get sick of it and spend to make themselves feel better. — Tom Ford

I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege. — Ben Barnes

Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe called to them. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside. They passed straight through ... — Pauline Fisk

All we do is work to maximise our consumption privileges and to be able to tell people at parties that we're a lawyer, an artist or a police officer. — Robert Wringham

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. — Shirley Jackson

The doorbell rings and I sink into a heap on the carpet. With any luck, whoever is down there will just go away.
But I'm just starting to think nothing goes away, no matter how deep you try to bury it. — Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end. — Brett Armstrong

I see myself as a character actor, and I've always been drawn to playing characters that are different from myself because acting is escapism for me. I've never been that comfortable playing people that are like me. — Alessandro Nivola

I think we love the escapism of something like 'Cinderella,' and I think we do with 'Thor.' — Kenneth Branagh

Some people call reading an escape, but it's not - it's embracing the true reality of the best parts of who we are. It's not running away; it's running toward the thing we wish we could be, the thing we strive to be, the thing we never can be, but the thing which we always must try to become if we want to be something more than we are. — Sean Gibson

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

For me, visuals are as important as the music. I just love escapism and giving people something to escape to. To me, that's what art is. — Iggy Azalea

Fantasy is escapism, but wait ... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human. — Terry Pratchett

Music is escapism, it's entertainment. — Andy Taylor

All I listened to until age 18 growing up was musical theater. I liked the escapism of it. — Rachel Bloom

[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 self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.
(pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America") — Wendell Berry

All those other lives. You never did get to lead them. — Mark Haddon

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. — William Styron

All books are escapism. They are life with the boring bits cut out. — Jean Chapman

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 rat race that's tricky. — Fennel Hudson

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. — C.S. Lewis

Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history? — Robert Wringham

Art is subjective and art as a form of entertainment escapism is as high art as any. — Miranda Hart

Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they stay there. — Chuck D

I grew up very much in a sporting background. I always wanted to be an actor, but my escapism always came in sports. — Bradley James

It's fogging a little, but I won't slip off and hide in it. No ... never again ... — Ken Kesey

I've indulged all my escapist dreams. I'm here, away from everyone, living it up. Being a selfish and antisocial git. — Fennel Hudson

Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism. — Maggie Stiefvater

Often the most tricky questions are the ones we secretly know the answers of.
What are you running from?
What are you waiting for? — Sanhita Baruah

That's all books are. Escapism borne of wonderfully crafted words that describe far off lands. Sentences that ask and answer within seconds. Paragraphs that slay dragons and ride horses into the midnight sky. Chapters that describe the sensation of pounding hearts and consuming desire, each feeling chronicling the incredible sensation of falling in love. — Emma Hart

My theme is chivalry. I have tried to show that this old tradition is practical and vital. The ideal embodied in Launcelot is 'escapism' in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable. — C.S. Lewis

Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment. — Rasheed Ogunlaru

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

My mom didn't let me play video games growing up, so now I do. Gaming gives me a chance to just let go, blow somebody up and fight somebody from another dimension. It's all escapism. — Wayne Brady

Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result. — Steve Erickson

I like to laugh. It's kind of escapism. I like to make people laugh. And I kind of like people just to have to not think about anything — Chelsea Handler

What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world? — Cornelia Funke

Sleeping is the most common attempt to temporarily escape reality. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Understand, it's never been easy to live,
when we're trying to escape ourselves. — Kelli Russell Agodon

It strikes me that people want to be engaged, and that those who go into a bookstore in a time of crisis are much more likely to be looking for explanation than for escapism. — Michael Korda

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism. — James Cameron

All through my life what I've loved doing is watching movies. I love the escapism of film, I love stories. So it is incredible to be able to be in them as much as I am, to see them from the first stitch in a costume to the end product. — Keira Knightley

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away. — J. Maarten Troost

Many spiritual people are involved in a radical denial of what is happening. They want to transcend it, get rid of it, get out of it, get away from it. There's nothing wrong with that feeling, but the approach doesn't work because it's escapism in spiritual clothing. It's wearing spiritual clothing and spiritual concepts, but it is really no different than a drunk in the gutter who doesn't want to feel the pain anymore. When you abide and accept everything completely and fully, you automatically go beyond. — Adyashanti

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 live. — Fennel Hudson

Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Cowell Devlin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical - angelic patronage, invitations into paradise - and Anna's story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna's acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead - he was only missing? He was sending her 'messages' that proved the depth of his love - and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl's own devising. The boy could only be dead. — Eleanor Catton

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. — Philip Roth