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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
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.
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.
Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
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.