John Dos Passos

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The “reality” he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (author of the U.S.A. trilogy), “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, September 1928.