Debbie Foster

By the fantastic, I mean something that is exotic, outlandish, or shocking (apparently, it is trying to get our attention), something that actually happened in both the material and menal domains, which are in turn being mediated by the imagination.

To lexicographers, words are like abstract expressionist paintings, complicated and demanding of quiet contemplation and analysis. Their power lies in their existence, not their deployment. To others, though, words are armaments in an endless war, and the dictionary is the manufacturer.

The predictive brain has much in common with Freud's general understanding of how the mind functions. Predictions are comparable to desires (or wishes), and desires encounter limitations imposed by reality. Behaviour is a compromise, a middle way negotiated between internal drives and the environment. These compromises are, in effect, revised

When I read Quentin Bell's biography of Woolf, I stop at 1940 because I don't want to kill her. If I hold back the page, she'll never reach the river.

This liberalism relies upon the idea that consciousness is not a thing but an activity; that its elemental constituent is not some soul-like substance but the activity of understanding; that it knows itself and the world only imperfectly, through its reflections on the world and itself; that its freedom is a matter of degree and a function of its

I would like to be able to gently drift in and out of existence when I wanted to.

Henry Rollins

the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly,

Dropping the usefulness/uselessness framework restores us to the living purpose of fiction, which is for it to exist: for people to tell stories because they want to tell them. And it also puts artists in the same uncomfortable seat as everybody else; it's our job to save ourselves, and not to use art as a substitute for doing politics.