Why is fiction so important always?

Readers of fiction should always keep foremost in their minds the overriding question of what makes fiction such an important part of life, generation after generation, century after century.  Fiction, at its best, is far more than  entertainment.  As William Faulkner accepted his Nobel Prize for literature, he suggested that fiction does not simply describe life but instead that its most worthwhile achievement is "to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."    

One other quote from still another author:

"If you have a tale worth telling,,,,,,,,,tell it." 

  J.P. Cunningham