Sometime in childhood I made a bargain that limited, so I thought, the power over me that real experience had, the real experience which comes to us in act and incident and through the proximate, continuous existence of those we love. All right, I said, I’ll let a quantity of that stream over me, if I can have a balancing portion of this, the other kind of experience, which is controlled, and repeatable, and comes off the page. I learned to pump up the artificial realities of fiction from page to mind at a pressure that equalised with the pressure of the world, so that (in theory) the moment I actually lived in could never fill me completely, whatever was happening.

Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (2002)