If this is not magic, by the way, I don’t know what it is. The last element, the sexual one, is more complex. I hope I will not be understood as being sexist if I say that, within our culture, I believe that this anti-fiction attitude is basically a male one. The American boy and man is very commonly forced to define his maleness by rejecting certain traits, certain human gifts and potentialities, which our culture defines as ‘womanish’ or ‘childish.’ And one of these traits or potentialities is, in cold sober fact, the absolutely essential human faculty of imagination…

But I must narrow the definition to fit our present subject. By ‘imagination,’ then, I personally mean the free play of the mind, both intellectual and sensory. By ‘play’ I mean recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new. By ‘free’ I mean that the action is done without an immediate object of profit – spontaneously. That does not mean, however, that there may not be a purpose behind the free play of the mind, a goal; and the goal may be a very serious object indeed. Children’s imaginative play is clearly a practicing at the acts and emotions of adulthood; a child who did not play would not become mature. As for the free play of an adult mind, its result may be ‘War and Peace,’ or the theory of relativity.

To be free, after all, is not to be undisciplined. I should say that the discipline of the imagination may in fact be the essential method or technique of both art and science. It is our Puritanism, insisting that discipline means repression or punishment, which confuses the subject. To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but to train it – to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful, whether it is a peach tree or a human mind. I think that a great many American men have been taught just the opposite. They have learned to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. They have learned to fear it. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? (1974)