“Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.”

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.”

“Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity”

“We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.”

“These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.”

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

“While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)”