Constant readers become writers at the point in life when they acquire a fascination with a process of falsification: with imposing shape while simulating the evolution of character and event, making determinations while fostering an illusion that in the next chapter anything might happen. A novelist spends a lifetime in the business of presenting what’s lifelike, but not like life.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 954