I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child’s play, an extension of make believe – something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing – how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?
— Mavis Gallant, Selected Stories (1996)
(found in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations)
Anyone who fails to understand the human need to read and write fiction, fails to understand what it is to be human. Our entire progress over the last 40,000 years has been based upon our ability to create worlds outside of our own. It’s how we measure our lives, and how we expand them beyond what is possible in a single span.