I explained to him that I was writing my senior thesis for my BA on the role of genre literature in the literary community. The first question I asked was what did Jordan feel the role of genre literature, especially fantasy, plays in the literary community.
He answered, “Well if you’re talking about fantastical literature in particular, I believe that Terry Pratchett summed it up best, but I’m not sure he’s the actual originator of the comment. When we read fantastic literature, we are forced to believe in things that do not exist. It is a necessity for civilization that we have the capability to believe in things that do not exist. Because justice, mercy cannot be found with the most scientific instrument; they cannot be weighed on the finest scales. These are things that exist solely because we believe in them. They stop existing the moment we stop believing in them. So, by believing in things that don’t exist, we prepare ourselves to believe in those that are necessary.”
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.