The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.
A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.
I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
As children, we have vivid imaginations. We stay up late waiting for Santa Claus, dream of becoming president, and have ideas that defy physics. Then something happens. As we grow older, we start editing our imagination.
Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
I grew up in a desert, which has no kind of imagination.
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.
Powerful imaginations are conservative.
What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.
I'm not smart enough to write about something that didn't actually happen to me. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to my head.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
I could never have thought, "I wanna play a two-headed woman." That just never would have occurred to me, in a million years.
When you are doing a film about real people, you don't have a lot of manoeuvrability when it comes to how much you can add by way of imagination. You have to replicate what they were like. What you can add to it is your version of it.
I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?
Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.
Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven't been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.
When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "John Gardner in 1979"){kind=small}
