The suggestion that the world could be completely other than it is always annoys those who are content with the way things are. Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one. Rulers are suspicious of new worlds where their writ does not run. Jailers don’t like escapism.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Foreword to David Pringle, ed., The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1999)
(Source)
Often just given as "Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
Quotations about:
escapism
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway-familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?
Grant Morrison (b. 1960) Scottish comic book writer and playwright
“SUPERMAN and THE AUTHORITY annotations Pt 2,” blog entry (16 Feb 2022)
(Source)
The problem of drugs, of divorce, of race prejudice, of unmarried pregnancy, and so on — as if evil were a problem, something that an be solved, that has an answer, like a problem in fifth grade arithmetic. If you want the answer, you just look in the back of the book. That is escapism, that posing evil as a “problem,” instead of what it is: all the pain and suffering and waste and loss and injustice we will meet our loves long, and must face and cope with over and over and over, and admit, and live with, in order to live human lives at all.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) American writer
“The Child and the Shadow,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (Apr 1975)
(Source)
On the difficulty of "realistic fiction" for children to teach morality. First delivered as a speech; later reprinted in The Language of the Night (1979).
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) German-American author, poet
Factotum, ch. 31 (1975)
The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist. […] If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) American writer
“Escape Routes,” Galaxy (Dec 1974)
Reprinted in The Language of the Night (1979).
Though Le Guin makes it clear it's a paraphrase, the main body of this passage is often misrepresented as an actual quotation from J. R. R. Tolkien (and with an exclamation point on the final sentence). It was, instead, inspired by Tolkien's comments on escapism in "On Fairy-Stories" (1939).
More discussion on this quotation: Not a Tolkien quote: "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory" - thetolkienist.com
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) English writer, fabulist, philologist, academic [John Ronald Reuel Tolkien]
“On Fairy-Stories” (1939, rev 1947)
(Source)
At least there are more forms of escapism than those who bandy that word about are always aware of. An artist, for instance, may escape from the problems of his art — which are hard to solve — into a consideration of the problems of society which he sometimes seems to think require of him only that he complain about them. Even the ordinary citizen is not always guiltless of similar techniques and it is, for example, sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.
Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.
The pleasure arising from an extraordinary agitation of the mind is frequently so great as to stifle humanity; hence arises the entertainment of the common people at executions, and of the better sort at tragedies.
Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765-1848) French Catholic missionary in India [Abbe J. A. Dubois]
(Attributed)
Most people today don’t want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety. They want answers that are, in effect, escapes.
Louis Kronenberger (1904-1980) American critic, novelist, biographer
“Unbrave New World,” The Cart and the Horse (1964)
An allusion to Proverbs 15:1 "A soft answer turneth away wrath."
I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.
Ashleigh Brilliant (b. 1933) Anglo-American epigramist, aphorist, cartoonist
Pot-Shots, #0826
