John Gardner on what writers do

"What the writers I care most about do is take fiction as the single most important thing in life after life itself -- life itself being both their raw material and the object of their celebration. They do it not for ego but simply to make something singularly beautiful. Fiction is their religion and comfort: when they are depressed, they go not to church or psychoanalysis but to Salinger or Joyce, early Malamud, parts of Faulker, Tolstoy, or the Bible as a book. They write, themselves, to make things equally worthy of trust -- not stories of creeps and cynics but stories of people capable of a measure of heroism, capable of strong and honest feeling at least some of time, capable of love and sacrifice -- capable of all this, and available as models for imitation. Everything true writers do, I think, from laborious plotting on butcher paper or three-by-five cards to laborious revision, draft after draft, they do to create characters -- the center and heart of all true fiction -- characters who will serve till Messiah comes, characters whose powerful existence in our minds makes a real-life messiah unnecessary. Imperfect, even childish human beings, writers raise themselves up by the techniques of fiction to something much better than even the best of writers are in everyday life: ordinary mortals transmutted for the moment into apostles." - John Gardner, from On Writers and Writing