The best reader, is one who is most open to human possibility, to understanding the great range of plausibility in human actions. It’s not true that modern life is too fantastic to be written about successfully. It’s that the most successful work is so demanding…. the novel’s vitality requires risks not only by them [writers] but by readers as well. Maybe it’s not writers alone who keep the novel alive but a more serious kind of reader.

– Don DeLillo, ‘A Talk with Don DeLillo’, The New York Times