Education Quote by Jonathan Kellerman

The line lands like a stand-up confession, but it’s really a psychologist’s sly defense of imagination as disciplined labor. Kellerman frames creative focus as “spacing out,” reclaiming the grade-school label for inattention and turning it into a professional credential. The joke carries a quiet rebuke of institutions that confuse compliance with intelligence: what teachers call “trouble” can, in adulthood, become the very skill that earns you a paycheck, provided it’s channeled and timed.

That phrase “imaginary friends” does double duty. On the surface it’s charming, self-deprecating, almost childlike. Underneath, it’s a precise description of character construction: the novelist’s task is to build inner lives so vivid they begin to push back, to act with a logic that feels discovered rather than invented. Coming from a psychologist, it also nods to the porous border between clinical listening and fictional empathy. Both are exercises in entering another mind without claiming to own it.

The fragment about “Isaac” and “when the time’s right” suggests process over control: the author can’t brute-force a character’s emergence or a plot turn. He’s waiting for the psyche of the story to ripen, for the internal motivations to click into place. It’s a small manifesto for patience and play, arguing that serious work sometimes looks, from the outside, like daydreaming.