Creativity Quote by Saul Steinberg

Saul Steinberg treats inquiry as an act of invention. Calling questions fiction points to the way a question frames reality before any evidence appears. It selects characters, suggests motives, sets a stage: Why did this happen? implies causes and agents; What is it? assumes stable essences; Who is to blame? already sketches a plot. The act of asking is not neutral; it is narrative-making. Answers, then, extend that narrative, ranging from more fiction to science-fiction. Some simply tidy up the story the question began. Others extrapolate far beyond the given facts, projecting models, futures, and unseen mechanisms that function like speculative tales.

The phrase science-fiction carries a double edge. It nods to the genre that imagines worlds to think through present realities, and it teases the scientific impulse to model the world through hypotheses, diagrams, and metaphors. A scientific model is a made thing, a disciplined fiction meant to be tested. It can be powerful and true in its predictions while still being, at heart, a representation. Steinberg, whose New Yorker drawings turned labels, maps, and lines into witty ontologies, knew how signs conjure worlds. His famous map that shrinks the globe beyond Ninth Avenue shows how perspective, not just fact, organizes reality. The question is the first stroke of that map.

Rather than cynicism about truth, the remark invites epistemic humility and artistic courage. It asks us to notice how our questions bias our answers, how framing creates blind spots, and how explanation is often imaginative work. It also honors the productive role of fiction: by making and testing stories, including scientific ones, we discover. The task is not to stop telling stories, but to tell them knowingly, revise them relentlessly, and keep the gap between representation and reality in view.