I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Being able to write creatively or read creative fiction is the best way to exercise your imagination.
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.
People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients.
I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.
I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.