罗斯想象的生活是虚构的，和小说一样，和自传一样。

Roth imagines lived life as fictional in the same register as a novel, in the same register as an autobiography.

youdao

在弗罗斯特的作品中，事物不是“虚构的”，不是想象中的“虚构”，而是凭空虚构出来的，就像仙女和精灵一样。

Things are not "made up" in Frost, not "made up" in the sense of imagined, but called up out of thin air, like fairies and elves.

youdao

和过去打交道让我感觉太拘束了，就像我写的东西必须是事实，不能虚构，但写与未来有关的东西给了我更多的自由去想象，去创作。

I felt too constrained working with the past, like what I wrote needed to be fact as opposed to fiction, but writing about the future gave me more freedom to imagine, to invent.

youdao

Imagine--this didn't, of course, actually happen, but imagine--the crucial point here is simply that we can imagine this story happening, not even that we think it's empirically possible, just it's conceivable, it's an imaginable story.

想象,当然,实际上并没发生,最关键的地方就是想象,故事因此而产生,别去想实际上是否可能发生,只需要一点想象,这是个虚构的故事

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