Believing in the Unreal

We are not geniuses, most of us who write novels, but we are, many of us, people who have chosen to live the surrogate life of the imagination. We have, perhaps, settled for that state which Wallace Stevens speaks of. "The final belief," he said, "is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else."

Brian Moore in The Agony And The Ego, edited by Clare Boylan, 1994