Neil Gaiman on reading fiction, empathy and changing the world - Driverless Crocodile

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever. Fiction is terrific at giving factual, pysc

By telling—or by reading—a story of what didn’t in fact happen, but could have happened or could yet happen, to somebody who isn’t an actual person but who might have been or could be, we open the door to the imagination. And imagination is the best, maybe the only way we have to know anything about each other’s minds and hearts.

Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

Stories help us make sense of the world and our place in it.