Perhaps we give animal stories to children and encourage their interest in animals because we see children as inferior, mentally “primitive,” not yet fully human: so we see pets and zoos and animal stories as “natural” steps on the child’s way up to adult, exclusive humanity—rungs

Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or lying.

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.

In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media.

“How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”

Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallise imagination to the point of fossilising it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, a

And she tells me that the word fantasy also came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present.” And again, those representations, those imaginations, can be true ones, or false. They can be the insights and foresights that make human life possible, or the d

I’ve spent a good deal of vehemence objecting to the reduction of fiction to ideas.