Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I get transported when I read books.

I'm always reading. I've loved reading since I was young, and I've always loved sinking my teeth into a different world, especially one that you begin to create in your head.

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

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.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

For me, reading was always the great escape without getting your fingers burnt.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

When you read a book, you are letting another person distract your thoughts and work your emotions. If they are adept, there's nothing better than turning off and getting lost.

I've loved the escapism of being another person, slipping into another character for a little while.

While it's really hard to do, at the same time, I'm escaping my body, which I really want to do. I'm living someone else's life. I get very intensely into the story, into the interviews and the research. I'm experiencing things along with my subjects. I have a freedom I don't have in my physical life.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

People who read on holiday always have a better time because it's total escapism, both physically and mentally.

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

Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.

Reading is something I've really missed, not being able to enter people's worlds.

All I wanted to do was read, to be told stories. Stories were full of excitement and emotions and characters that entertained and often inspired.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

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

What acting offered me was the chance to be many other people.