"...a warehouse of facts managed by a poet and a liar."

Philip Roth delivered these remarks at The National Book Critics Circle in 1988:

'The imagination has a conscience all of its own; you wouldn't want it as a friend. This butcher, imagination, wastes no time with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly it slits its throat, and then with its bare hands it pulls forth the guts ... By the time the imagination is finished with this fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to a fact.'
Comments well substantiated by the 'Fortean Times', a periodical which reports on weird things such as woman gives birth to fish, lawnmower shoots man, a house that bleeds, tomatoes which use the telephone, man clubbed to death by a cucumber. Not figments of the imagination, the editor claims, since all articles are endorsed with place, date and time of the happening. In an age where science is seen to explain everything, he says, awareness of the inexplicable is important. No wonder imagination has been described as a warehouse of facts managed by a poet and a liar. However, sometimes there could be an explanation for such phenomena. The examples quoted in the book 'The Nature of Things' (subtitled 'The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects') may make you think twice. As G.K. Chesterton explained, the function of the imagination is 'not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.''