Creativity Quote by Saul Steinberg

Steinberg’s line is a cartoonist’s shrug turned into philosophy: the neat little question mark is already a drawing, a stylized promise that reality can be boxed, labeled, and carried off in a sentence. Calling questions “fiction” doesn’t mean they’re useless; it means they’re constructed. A question frames the world before the world gets a vote. It smuggles in assumptions about what counts as relevant, what categories exist, what kind of answer would be considered “legible.” In Steinberg’s hands, that framing is the real artwork.

The second half is where the wit sharpens. Answers, he says, range from “more fiction to science-fiction,” collapsing the hierarchy we like to preserve: soft, subjective stories on one side; hard, objective truth on the other. Steinberg needles the arrogance of certainty, suggesting that even our best explanations are narratives with costumes. “Science-fiction” lands as a sly compliment and a warning: science is powered by imagination, but it’s also a genre with its own tropes - progress plots, clean causality, the fantasy that complexity will eventually be mastered.

Context matters: Steinberg spent a lifetime making images that expose how symbols govern perception - maps that lie by design, cities reduced to witty shorthand, bureaucracy rendered as visual labyrinth. This quote belongs to that project. It’s a reminder that inquiry isn’t a neutral flashlight; it’s a pen. We don’t just discover answers. We author them, then argue about which drafts deserve to be called true.