I've been asking myself lately what I want from reading that I don't want from other art forms, and the closest I can get is this: I want access to the fullest possible account of what it is to be a human being in the world. Not the most entertaining account, not the most beautiful, but the most complete.

Film and music give me beauty and rhythm and emotion. They give me surface in the fullest sense — the visible and the audible. What they don't give me is the interior in the same way. The novel, through its access to consciousness and its ability to slow time down inside a character's mind, gives me something no other form can match.

This is why I read despite everything else that competes for attention. Not because fiction is better than other forms — it isn't, it's just different — but because it offers something I can't get anywhere else.