Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

I was a slightly melancholy child and I think films were a way of escaping for me.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

I had very low self-esteem. Books saved me. I found friends in stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. During lunch hour at school I'd avoid social interactions by sitting on the bathroom sink and reading. My mother worked in my school cafeteria. When my anxiety got really bad, I'd put a coat on, grab my book and a flashlight, and hide in the freezer with the mac and cheese.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

Because some of my at-home life was rough and lonely, I often looked to escape into my imagination. Science fiction provided a deep well to pull from and was something easily accessible to me.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

When I was growing up, the place I felt least alone was when I was reading.

Even though music is something I travel around doing, it is also a very private thing. A sort of escapism.

Whether it's a kid in high school who doesn't have any friends and finds friends in my characters, or a guy in Afghanistan, who's trying to forget what he did that day, and trying not to think about what he's gotta do tomorrow... I give them a little bit of an escape.

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

I made my own fictional land, which is 'Bell Choir Coast.' It was a response to feeling really, really lost, and it was what I was looking for.

Films were really my church. As a young kid, it was movies and books; it was nothing remarkable, really, just that is where I felt soothed, that is where I felt most myself... safest.

I was always lonesome. The only time I felt accepted or wanted was when I was on stage performing. I guess the stage was my only friend: the only place where I could feel comfortable. It was the only place where I felt equal and safe.

During the first couple of years at school... I used to take my lunch and go down by the old fair grounds & sit alone by the side of the road & eat it... Those lovely, lonely lunches stick deep in my memory as unhappy times.

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.

I felt like an outcast and turned to books, fantasy in particular, to find a place for myself. Reading took me away from this world, which I needed.

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

Games helped me a lot when The Rev died. It was something I able to go do and stay in the house and not have to be outside and deal with people. But I also found a community online that I was able to escape the feeling I was having of losing a best friend.

The music has a very strong escapist quality to it. In the moment where you feel like you need to escape, or when you are escaping, that's a good time to listen to 'When the Night.'

I know that New York is big - there are huge buildings - but, in fact, it's quite small and contained... I like it when cities are melancholic. When it started snowing, for example, I felt very lonely. I felt very comfortable and very relaxed. When that happens, I write. So I've been writing, not a lot, but I'm inspired every day.