Politics & Power Quote by Alan Dean Foster

Foster is quietly rebuking the fantasy that imagination alone can do the whole job. “Living gives you a better understanding of life” reads almost tautological, but that’s the point: it’s a gentle jab at armchair authority and a defense of craft as lived accumulation. He’s not romanticizing suffering or travel as mystical credentials; he’s making a working writer’s claim that time in the world thickens the page.

The telling move is how quickly he pivots from self to structure: deeper characters aren’t just “more complex” in the abstract, they’re “more rounded personalities,” a phrase that suggests dimensionality rather than melodrama. That’s a seasoned genre novelist talking. In science fiction and fantasy, writers are often accused of building elaborate worlds while leaving people flat. Foster flips the critique: the best worldbuilding is downstream from human observation.

Then comes the real thesis: cultural difference doesn’t merely decorate a story, it drives “people, politics and art.” He’s arguing against the default setting of a single culture being treated as neutral and everyone else as “local color.” Travel, for him, isn’t tourism; it’s a force multiplier for empathy and for accuracy, because politics and art aren’t detachable from the social codes that produce them.

Contextually, Foster’s career spans eras when American pop speculative fiction often exported a narrow worldview. This quote signals a corrective: if you want convincing aliens, empires, and aesthetics, start by admitting how strange humans already are to one another.