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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

The fact is fiction is always a representation of life, sometimes the lives of famous people.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

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.

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.