" A novel…is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience… You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there's nothing you can't do, if you do it with passion. "

― James A. Michener , The Fires of Spring