Louis Dodge: That it enables an individual to go places and do things (vicariously) and utter sayings which would otherwise be beyond him. A reader is a man with a score of eyes and hands and feet.
Phyllis Duganne: Interest, I suppose. The main object of most people's lives is not to be bored—and fiction can help them attain that grand end considerably. And for people whose lives are dull and rather empty, I suppose fiction offers an outlet; the reader can become hero or heroine and do grand and noble things. Just like the movies.
J. Allan Dunn: In an attempt to be brief, I think it is a conjuration of what he or she would like to have been if their lots had been cast differently. I think it sometimes stimulates to adventures, to a struggle against the commonplace. That it can undoubtedly mold opinion and create a recognition of the virtues. That it can show—if the fiction is painted with the colors from the palette of Life itself, excellent example. That it is the poor man's purse and the stay-at-home's vicarious romance. It is Aladdin's Lamp—the Magic Carpet.
Walter A. Dyer: This is rather too deep for me. Fiction is, in a measure, in its relation to life, what massage is to exercise. Mighty useful sometimes.
Walter Prichard Eaton: Say—have a heart! Well, in one word—"Escape."
E. O. Foster: To my own mind fiction is as necessary as food to the body. The tired man or woman may throw themselves out of the ordinary routine returning refreshed to take up again the "hum-drum" labors of life.
Arthur O. Friel: Entertainment; refreshment by substituting new pictures for those of every-day life.
J. U. Giesy: The spirit of play—make-believe—the element of the "might have been"—relaxation, change. The mind reaches out to contact other than routine experience.
George Gilbert: Its power to lift the reader out of himself and make him live in another realm.
Kenneth Gilbert: A sincere desire to escape if but momentarily from the commonplaces of life. If we have imagination at all we are adventurers; we have a curiosity to see the odd and unusual; to possess a helmet of invisibility and the power of levitation; to have the under-currents of human impulse that we sense yet can not describe run before us as we would have them do.