If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish.
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six... he needed me to escape from being 50.
You can't run away from yourself
you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
I have two lives, and all the problems I might have, I feel like I drop them once I step on to the match court.
There are some things which are so horrific that some people feel they can't do anything about it: that the natural, understandable response is to tune it out.
People talk-- they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.
We take refuge in illness and then are trapped there.
No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear...the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away. (5)
Our society's need for escapism has always interested me.
you just can't wait to get out of your head, can you?" "if you were in here you might want that too.
Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.
When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.
My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.
I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
There's a natural human compulsion to chase after freedom and then to actually hand it over as fast as possible and get away from it.
Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.
When we run from our feelings, they follow us. Everywhere.
The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable.
But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.
