What I mean to say is that I didn’t start out writing and drawing Nausicaä because I specifically wanted to talk about ecosystems or the need to protect the environment. I started out intending to set the story in the desert, but when I drew some illustrations they weren’t very interesting, so then I came up with the idea of setting the story in a

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Art requires access to the imagination, a notoriously difficult place to visit. The imagination fuels an idea. The artist acts urgently, often impulsively, on that idea but brings conscious rigor to the evaluation of what the imagination has spewed. Ultimately, experience, intellect, insight, and drive enable them to shape the work and then to edit

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For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning. That creates a dynamic the novelist can use as a kind of lever in the fashioning of his narrative. This is quite a roundabout way to do things, an

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