Antonio Banderas Quotes

I'm no romantic, surfing, California boy. I like reading, writing, philosophizing. Scheming. I've been doing some exploration of the inner space.

A writer needs a life of introspection.

I loved to read books in the free world, and there was a lot of time to sit around and do nothing in prison. When you read, it opens up your mind; it helped us take our minds away from where we were.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.

Writing is an amazing place to hide, to go into the rabbit hole, and pull the trap door down over your head.

I spent a lot of time in my head, but not like caring about what everybody else thought, just literally in my own world.

I would go home and be this insular girl who listened to music and brooded in her bedroom.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I'm writing-really fast. I'm puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It's an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It's sitting alone with fictional characters. You're escaping from the world in your own way and that's fine. Why not?

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

books have been my greatest comfort, castle-building a never-failing delight, and scribbling a very profitable amusement.

I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.

Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.

Music can be a source of escapism.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.