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.