Emerson Hough: Maybe bread and butter, and love.
A. S. M. Hutchinson: Being "told a story."
Inez Haynes Irwin: It offers release and escape from whatever burdens life has brought and it extends experience.
Will Irwin: It satisfies the social desire—the human love of knowing and, if possible, of liking, other people. And it gives the illusion of widened experience.
Charles Tenney Jackson: The elemental hold of fiction on the human mind appears to be that it is the last adventure, the last romance, the bringing of novelty, of charm, of forgetfulness. Life for men has become so standardized, so propagandized, chucked into routines by civilization, that his primal stirrings—which, primitively, he satisfied by clubbing his dinner out of the jungle or swiping a woman from his neighboring tribe—must now be soothed in reading about it in its modern phases. That's why you sell magazines—sure!
Frederick J. Jackson: Principally, I think, the chance it affords a person to get outside of himself, to be for the time being, while he reads, something he is not, something he wants to be, to live vicariously life and action that he has no chance to live in the flesh, but would like to live. Then again, to learn, to laugh—W. C. Tuttle's stuff holds more laughs to the page than that of any other writer, to me, at least. But what's the use? Some analytical guy will answer in a thesis on psychology that will "knock" 'em cold. I can't or won't.
Mary Johnston: It is a mode of truth.
John Joseph: It is based on the almost universal passion to see the triumph of the right. And a story in which everything seems likely to go to pot and then suddenly straightens out right will always hold the reader provided it is plausibly told. Sympathy for the underdog is a phase of this point, too.
Too, every human is more or less of a hero worshiper, and has also a tremendous urge to get into the limelight himself. And if he can't actually get in, the next best thing is to imagine himself there. Hence there is always more or less of a tendency to picture himself as the hero.
This urge for the limelight is a fundamental trait of human nature, and a very necessary one. It is simply a desire to appear well in the sight of his fellowman; and it is really the driving-power behind all human endeavor beyond satisfaction of the purely animal desires. Hence, a story should 'rouse something in the reader that will make him want to get busy and take a hand himself, so to speak. That is my idea of a really good story—one that will hold the reader from start to finish—and no mere mechanical perfection or nicety of literary diction can possibly take the place of it.