“Why we write.Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless. Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful terror. Because as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes) it passes the time. Because Death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs. Because epitaphs well struck give Death, our vorcious master, heartburn. Because fiction imitates life's beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks. Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world. Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it. Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child. Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks. Because God, created in the storyteller's image, can be destroyed only by its maker. Because in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious, and because in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life. Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood. Because in the beginning was the gesture and in the end the come, as well in between what we have are words. Because of all arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men. Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretentions. Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow upon (it must be said) no surface. Because the world is reinvented every day and this is how it is done. Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression. Because truth, that illusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there. Because writing, in all spaces unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all. And because, alas, what else?”