I am awed by fiction

I have never fully grasped why it is, only that it is, that I enjoy the fictional representation of real life over the actual life itself. Realism in literature and films in general (due to their obvious attempt at representation of life with humans doing the acting) have always held a certain amount of mystery and allure. In the cool, dark silence of the theater we can be fully swept away into another dimension. In our minds, the pages can drift away and our imagination can make the fictional seem much more real than anything in our lives. I don't want to understand why. I just like that words mean more when they are purposeful...and in good fiction they always are.

e.g.

"ANTHONY PATCH

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already
gonesince irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at
least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the
ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet
at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the
conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he
is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene
thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond,
 these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks
 himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated,
well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than
any one else he knows.

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very
attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he
considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing
that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the
dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between
death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be
Anthony Patch--not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic
personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within
outward--a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet
had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave."

-the first two paragraphs of The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott
Fitzgerald.

:which is coincidentally in pre-production right now.  Keira Knightley
is set to play Zelda and Nick Cassavetes (director of The Notebook and
Alpha Dog) is setto direct.  I'm a little more than pumped.