A Surrogate Life of Imagination

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: "The final belief," he said, "is to believe in a fiction that you know to be a fiction."

Brian Moore in Agony and the Ego, edited by Clare Boylan, 1994