"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, my life as a bibliophile