I love great fiction. More than even the essays of Montaigne, fiction rivets, inspires, sticks in the mind, makes life seem worth living, if ever it doesn't. Novels, when upliftingly tragic or vivid with verisimilitude, can be unforgettably gripping. And yet I don't find my own life in many of them. That is, for instance, I wouldn't have married Madame Bovary or shipped out with Ahab. My life has not been Joseph Andrews's, David Copperfield's, or Raskolnikov's. I will always remember such template characters, but my own marital blunders, childhood collisions, career nicks and scrapes, and even my exaltation on certain radiant days when stretching my legs out-of-doors, are not synchronous with those that are plumbed in what we call masterpieces.

— Edward Hoagland, Compass Points