Only Hitting One

"Reading and writing are done alone and there's still a lovely privacy in that and a power about it, that you're affecting someone when they're alone. Which is probably the most powerful time to affect people. And I know we should all be making movies or writing rock songs or something. But fiction remains powerful in this sense, that you're hitting one person at a time. And I think that idea of only hitting one, therefore, has an interesting attraction and power to it."

~ Colm Tóibín, KCRW's Bookworm (April 17, 2008)