In Reply to the question "Why do you write?"

"Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the
deathless.
Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful
terror.
Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us,
passes), it passes the time.
Because death, our mirthless master, is somehow
amused by epitaphs.
Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious
master, heartburn.
Because fiction imitates life's beauty, thereby inventing
the beauty life lacks.
Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic
and familiar, for fucking the world.
Because fiction, mediating paradox,
celebrates it.
Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother
might her unloving child.
Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as
the world speaks.
Because God, created in the storyteller's image, can be
destroyed only by His maker.
Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the
disharmonious.
Because, in its profanity, fiction sanctifies
life.
Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to
brotherhood.
Because in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come
as well: in between what we have are words.
Because, of all the arts, only
fiction can unmake the myths that unman men.
Because of its endearing
futility, its outrageous pretensions.
Because the pen, though short, casts a
long shadow (upon, it must be said, no surface).
Because the world is
re-invented every day and this is how it is done.
Because there is nothing
new under the sun except its expression.
Because truth, that elusive joker,
hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there.
Because
writing, in all space's unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure
of all.
And because, alas, what else?"

Coover