Interviewer

Finally, a fundamental question: As a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

Hemingway

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

From The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958. Taken from the Paris Review Interviews Vol I, Picador, 2006.