The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change -- that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson, Learning to Write 32-33 (1888; repr. 1920).
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