To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

Burroughs draws a sharp ethical and epistemic line between creative presentation and fabrication. In nature writing (and, by extension, journalism, history, and science), he allows for imagination as a means of selection, emphasis, metaphor, and vivid description—ways of making observed reality intelligible and felt. What he rejects is “imagining” the facts themselves: inventing incidents, attributing motives or behaviors without evidence, or letting a preferred story override observation. The aphorism defends a standard of truthfulness while still valuing artistry, insisting that imagination should illuminate facts, not replace them.