On what is Fiction and how it helps the humankind

With reference to the ongoing discussion on the above subject, I have just compiled a few quotations on the above subject for benefit of the people who love reading novels, poetry, drama etc. per se !
1] “Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.”
― Raymond A. Mar

2] “The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.”
― Stephen Leacock,

3]“There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.”
― Orson Scott Card

4]“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”
― Isaac Babel

5] “The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.”
― Todd Strasser

6] “A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, and our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”
― Tim O’Brien

7] “Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.”
― Charlaine Harris,

8]“I love fictional characters…they can’t break your heart.”
–Julia Hall

9] “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Michael Scott,

10] “Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.” “if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.” ― Norton Juster
11]“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”
― Richard Bach
12] “But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West

13] “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace