Reading is living

" (...) My relationship with books has always verged on the pathological. I cannot live, travel, go to sleep, love or breathe without them. Every day I have to have at least ten of them in my bed, thin and thick, old and modern, proof or bound copies, which annotate, underline, add to,  whose pages I dog-ear and whose spines I ruin. I am a compulsive reader. I do not know, and often reproach myself for it, the pleasures of idless, the virtue of forgetting time in the time of a novel, the charm of settling into an essay as you do into a holiday resort in the summer. I devour. I absorb. I'm like that 1950s advertisement in which you saw Gerard Philippe biting his lovely white teeth into a bouquet of printed pages. It's not less intellectual and a lot more physical than you might think. Hence, no doubt, my passion for style, my liking fo the very material of the sentence, my attraction to the body of the text, my Flaubertian conviction that literature is something solid - and the reader, someone perpetually hungry."

Jérôme Garcin