Book Review: Monsieur Proust's Library - WSJ.com: A book, he felt, is "a friendship . . . and the fact that it is directed to one who is dead, who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving." Books are actually better than friends, Proust thought, because you turn to them only when you truly desire their company and can ignore them when you wish, neither of which is true of a friend. One also frequently loves people in books, "to whom one had given more of one's attention and tenderness [than] to people in real life." In his own novel, Proust wrote: "Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature."