Here is quotation by way of an addendum to my last post. John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, Addison-Wesley, 1994, p. 227:
What the writers I care most about do is to take fiction as the single most important thing in life after life itself — life itself being both their raw material and the object of their celebration. They do it not for ego but simply to make something singularly beautiful. Fiction is their religion and comfort: when they are depressed they go not to church or psychoanalysis but to Salinger or Joyce, early Malamud, parts of Faulkner, Tolstoy, or the Bible as book.
There are all sorts of false gods.