Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Walker’s remark celebrates the imaginative sovereignty of fiction: unlike memoir, journalism, or even realistic social novels constrained by verifiable fact, fiction can literalize desire and possibility. “Freedom” here points both to artistic license (the writer may break physical laws) and to moral/psychological liberation (characters can escape the limits imposed by society, history, or trauma). The image of making “someone…fly” evokes folktale, myth, and magical realism—modes that can express truths about hope, transcendence, and survival when ordinary realism feels inadequate. It also hints at fiction’s ethical power: by inventing new outcomes, writers and readers rehearse alternative futures and expand what feels thinkable in real life.