Evelyn Waugh Quotes

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I'm afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.

England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

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?

I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.

Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives.

Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.

I mainly let my imagination be my reality. Fantasy is my reality.

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

I’d much rather pretend I’m somewhere else, and any time I open the pages of a book, that happens.

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

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

You read, move your lips, figure out the words, and it's like you're in two places at the same time: you're sitting or lying with your legs curled up, your hand groping in the bowl, but you can see different worlds, far-off worlds that maybe never existed but still seem real. You run or sail or race in a sleigh--you're running away from someone, or you yourself have decided to attack--your heart thumps, life flies by, and it's wondrous: you can live as many different lives as there are books to read.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.