Does writing matter?

After reading Midnight's Children, I couldn't talk normally for a week, as Salman Rushdie's style had utterly supplanted my own. In this article, he explains why that's important.

And because the LA Times is stingy about how long it leaves links up, here's an excerpt:

One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one's guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.