"...it seeks within the four corners of a village love-story to tell the whole story of the world."

It is one of the strangest and silliest notions ever developed by man that fiction is a light matter, a thing less ambitious than the chronicles of knowledge. As if it were not clearly a task both heavier and more ambitious, to create things like a deity than to copy them like a parrot. Fiction is good precisely in so far as it is serious; the most exuberant old fictions, from The Frogs of Aristophanes to the Pickwick Papers of Dickens, were good because they were serious. Fiction attempts in the full sense of the terrible words to give a picture of life. It seeks to sum up many million phenomena in one mathematical symbol; it seeks within the four corners of a village love-story to tell the whole story of the world.

-quoted in The Pall Magazine, Volume 25 (1900)