A friend sent this to me. J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, June 2008 "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination," at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Full text attached.
"..... You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared....." JK Rowling for the full text as a word doc, email me at doochild6@gmail.com
