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Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.