I do not think that my interest in theater and literature has made me more abstract. Instead, it has joined me to the possible worlds that provide the landscape for thinking about the human condition, the human condition as it exists in the culture in which I live.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 128)
In this lecture I should like to ask how our pictures of the past are formed. The process seems collective, mysterious, emotional as much as intellectual. Our mental pictures are soft-focus, and yet curiously adhesive. We hear the facts, and our brains print the legend.
Hilary Mantel, “The Iron Maiden” (Reith Lecture 2, June 20, 2017)
The moment one abandons the idea that ‘the world’ is there once and for all and immutably, and substitutes for it the idea that what we take as the world is itself no more nor less than a stipulation couched in a symbol system, then the shape of the discipline alters radically.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 105)
Cliché is at the root of audience dissatisfaction, and like a plague spread through ignorance, it now infects all story media… The cause of this worldwide epidemic is simple and clear; the source of all clichés can be traced to one thing and one thing alone: The writer does not know the world of his story.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 67)
If you are creating a world out of words and there are speaking creatures in it, you suggest a great deal—whether you mean to or not—by naming them.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Inventing Languages” (2006) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 35)
One has to conclude that the subtle and systematic basis upon which linguistic reference itself rests must reflect a natural organization of mind, one into which we grow through experience rather than one we achieve by learning. If this is the case—and I find it difficult to resist—then human beings must come equipped with the means not only to calibrate the workings of their minds against one another, but to calibrate the worlds in which they live through the subtle means of reference. In effect, then, this is the means whereby we know Other Minds and their possible worlds.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, pp. 63–64)
You cannot give a complete account. A complete thing is an exhausted thing. You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged. The reader should be a welcome guest in your house of invention, but he shouldn’t put his feet up on the furniture.
Hilary Mantel, “Can These Bones Live?” (Reith Lecture 4, July 4, 2017)
