Neil Gaiman on the importance of reading fiction, and libraries.

"When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed."

...

"[...] all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all."

- Why the future depends on libraries, reading, and daydreaming, Neil Gaiman, The Guardian

Now, I just wish I liked his prose as much as his comics. I've read novel after novel of his, and I've found all of them somehow... hollow. Beautiful, but hollow. Same goes for his films MirrorMask and Coraline.

Video games 13,823, Huck Finn 8,088 - Roger Ebert's Journal

The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded. In exposing us to prose of the highest level, it encourages us to think in a way that isn't merely "better" but is more fanciful, creative, poetic and expressive. It makes us less boring, and less bore-able.

The poll is silly, but the quote is great. =)

When people ask me why I read, I tend to say that I read for entertainment - which isn't untrue. But entertainment encompasses so many things that the statement as interpreted might as well be. Learning is entertainment. Pleasure is entertainment. Seeing through new eyes is entertainment. Discovery is entertainment.

And this quote, well, it's a far more accurate answer than, 'I read for entertainment'.