Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
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.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.
Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.