Wishful thinking is thinking cut loose from reality, a self-indulgence that is often merely childish, but may be dangerous. Imagination, even in its wildest flights, is not detached from reality: imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to it to enrich it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)
I think that what the adaptor must do is set aside the source — whether it’s a history book or a novel — put down the text, and dream it. If you dream it, you might get it right, the spirit if not the letter; but if you are literal, you will set yourself up for failure.
Hilary Mantel, “Adaptation” (Reith Lecture 5, July 11, 2017)
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 and invent their own ways to live.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Operating Instructions” (2002) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)
The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis. But paradigmatic “imagination” (or intuition) is not the same as the imagination of the novelist or poet. Rather, it is the ability to see possible formal connections before one is able to prove them in any way.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 13)
It seems common sense that fact should be our common ground. But in fact, fact is so hard to come by, so dependent on point of view, so debatable, that we may be more likely to meet a shared reality in fiction. By telling—or by reading—a story of what didn’t in fact happen, but what could have happened or could yet happen, to somebody who isn’t an actual person but who might have been or could be, we open the door to the imagination. And imagination is the best, maybe the only way we have to know anything about each other’s minds and hearts.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)