“The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it — as I do many aphorisms — a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’). When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape — into different countries, mores, speech patterns — but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.”
— Julian Barnes, Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile, The Guardian
