Art & Creativity Quote by Edgar Rice Burroughs

There is no misty romance in Burroughs's line, just the clean, bracing honesty of a working writer staring down the rent. "I write to escape" reads at first like the usual artist's alibi - imagination as refuge - and then he snaps the phrase into place with the blunt second clause: "to escape poverty". The pivot is the whole trick. Burroughs takes a noble-sounding motive and reveals the engine underneath it: not transcendence, but survival.

That candor lands because it cuts against the cultural mythology of the author as aloof visionary. Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan and planetary adventure, is often associated with pure escapism, a brand of pulp wish-fulfillment. Here he quietly admits the bargain: he manufactures escape for readers because he needs one himself, and his escape route is economic. The subtext is almost industrial. Writing isn't therapy; it's a strategy. Fantasy becomes piecework that can lift a man out of precarity.

Context matters. Burroughs didn't emerge from a garret haloed by suffering; he bounced through jobs, faltered in business, and turned to fiction as a late-starting gamble that happened to hit. Early 20th-century magazine culture rewarded speed, series, and spectacle. His sentence sounds like someone who understands that the marketplace isn't a corruption of art; it's the condition art is made under.

It's also a quiet tell about ambition. "Escape" isn't just flight from hardship; it's an insistence on mobility. Burroughs makes poverty the antagonist and writing the vehicle, collapsing literary vocation into something startlingly modern: a hustle with a dream attached.