Carol Shields Quotes

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.

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.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.

I always loved having the chance to disappear in a story. I always was kind of obsessed with that.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

No matter what's happening in my life, I can always get lost in the romances of my characters.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world.

I don't write autobiographically.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

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.

To be transported into another world is my very favourite part of reading.

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 take a lot of enjoyment out of imagining myself as... I dunno... a wall. I keep adding bricks to my wall or little house.

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.