A Reason to Read Fiction

One of my book clubs is reading Ender's Game, so I picked my copy off the shelf last night. Orson Scott Card wrote the following in his introduction to the book, and I loved it:

"Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language--or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself."