“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

“My metaphors are dirty like herpes, but harder to catch, like an escape tunnel in prison I started from scratch.”

“Metaphor is reality once removed.”

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”

“[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby.”

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times — how to escape.”

“The revolutionary artist is born into a world of clichés, of stale images and signs which no longer pierce the consciousness to express reality. He therefore invents new symbols, perhaps a whole new symbolic system.”

“Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”