Quote

The literary equivalent of the emperor’s map would be a biography of everyone in the world, or a novel of every second of every minute of every day: literature, like a map, gains its power from selection, from miniaturization. And the writer, like the cartographer, must make careful decisions about every aspect of the map: from letters to words, sentences, and paragraphs, from chapters to sections and volumes. Literary cartography fascinates and guides the way that actual cartography does; that’s why we keep and carry stories in the same places we carry and keep maps: on our walls, in our pockets, and on our phones.

—http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/01/the-allure-of-the-map.html