Beverly Cleary Quotes

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

I spent my childhood in an imaginary world - probably because I needed an escape. I think that's one of the reasons people have imaginations - because they can't maintain existence here.

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.

Our society's need for escapism has always interested me.

A daydream is an evasion.

I think I spend most of my time not living in reality, actually.

If I don't think about it, it won't drive me crazy.

I think people respond to dystopian stories because they're ways of acting out anxieties that we have and fears that we have about the future. So much media's coming at you over the Internet, your brain gets overloaded. You don't know what to do with it. And one thing you can do with it is read a story.

In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.

My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life... I had to live in my head... art was a way of making myself feel better.

Ironing is a great diversion from the reality you don't want to face.

I'll close my eyes really, really tight and make you all go away.

I think when people are scared, they like to see movies where the scares are not real.

Reading was my escape growing up in Ohio. Both of my parents lost their jobs when I was a teen, and it was hard. But I always had my books. Reading gave me a way of living different lives.

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

Reality depresses me. I need to find fantasy worlds and escape in them.

I have a tendency to check out when the stakes are too high in a movie.

My mind is in another planet behind the blocks. Sometimes I'm up in the blocks, and I'm like, 'What am I doing here?' I'm just not trying to think too much.

I really, really wanted to lose awareness of the here and now. The best way for me to do that was bury myself in a book.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?

Most people cant' deal with reality, but indulge heavily in fantasy and fear.

I don't really deal with the attention I receive to be honest. I build up a fantasy world around me that I inhabit. I cherry pick elements of literature, music, film, history and art, then weave them together to construct a fantasy reality to live in. It doesn't always work out though, I got evicted from my own fantasy once, which was quite embarrassing.