Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
fiction