Art & Creativity Quote by Francois Mitterrand

Mitterrand frames books less as leisure than as life support, a private infrastructure that keeps the self tethered to something sturdier than mood, rumor, or power. Coming from a statesman, the line reads like a confession disguised as a maxim: the real world of politics is so elastic, so drenched in performance, that you need an external ballast to stop your mind from drifting into whatever narrative is most useful today. “Surrounded” is doing sly work here. It’s not enough to have read; the books must physically press in, creating a perimeter against the daily seductions of office.

The subtext is an anxiety about unreality, the peculiar condition of leaders who live inside filtered briefings, choreographed encounters, and the constant threat of flattery. Politics manufactures its own weather. Books, by contrast, are stubborn objects: they don’t clap, they don’t pivot, they don’t care who’s in the room. Their reality is not “facts” in the narrow sense, but scale and continuity: other minds, other centuries, consequences that outlast a news cycle. That’s the corrective Mitterrand implies a ruler most needs.

Context sharpens the point. Mitterrand governed France through ideological aftershocks of the Cold War and the media acceleration of late-20th-century public life. His remark doubles as a quiet defense of the cultivated statesman, but it also betrays a fear: without sustained contact with language that isn’t authored by advisers, power turns into a hall of mirrors. Books aren’t an escape from reality here; they’re the only reliable way back to it.