It is tacitly assumed that people don’t know themselves, but that if you furnish them with questions that are smart enough, they’ll be able to figure themselves out. They pose themselves a question, and they give themselves an answer. And they’ll inadvertently reveal to themselves that secret that they knew nothing of till now. And there is that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous — that we are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted.
“I read as much fiction as poetry and was equally affected by both, but my ignorant teachers and the ignorant authors of my textbooks had led me to suppose that an author of fiction is gifted with some sort of insight into human nature, and – more preposterous still – that the purpose of fiction is to create believable characters. I was in my twenties before I learned that I was admirably qualified to write fiction because I knew next to nothing about human nature and was incapable of creating any sort of characters, and I was in my forties before I learned that a certain sort of author may be able to write a work of fiction the meaning of which he himself cannot explicate.”
Gerald Murnane