In The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Ruhl, playwright, assumes that most people “live inside” the books they read, as she does, but most do not.

One reason fiction writers can write things most people cannot is that fiction writers have a different kind of subjective experience.

For example, although most people can suspend disbelief and get emotionally involved with a fictional story, they would not describe it as virtual reality, as “living inside” a book, as Ruhl does:

“I don’t want to meet most of my favorite writers. I want to give them their privacy in the afterlife. It is enough for me to live inside their books.” —quoted in New York Times Book Review interview of February 28, 2016

Nor do most people have such lifelike personalities inside them as the following quote suggests:

“I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” she has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” — Wikipedia, quoted from The New Yorker

When most people read such quotes, they assume that fiction writers are speaking metaphorically. And, of course, strictly speaking, they are. They do not actually live inside books or have an opera inside them. But these metaphors are based on a vivid, inhabited, inner world that seven out of ten people probably do not have.