There are as many reasons that humans feel the need to express themselves creatively as there are humans, but one significant one – to try and create the world we wish to live in – was described in very real terms by writer Mohsin Hamid as an antidote to the anxiety one is likely to feel in a place like the Middle East:
And for me, writing books and being, you know, someone who's politically active is part of that. I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.
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