“Conrad wrote that, ‘a work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.’  This is the heart of the matter.  No great work is remembered for its plot, that clumsy replication of ‘real life.’  Fiction, like poetry and music, lives in each moment of its being.  It exists outside of time, in the hope of inducing an altered state of consciousness, and stands or falls on the quality of echo it can ring against a reader’s sensibility.”

Robert Stone