American author (1929- )
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
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foreward, Tales from Earthsea
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
One swallow does not make a summer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing -- only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Eye of the Heron"
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"A Man of the People", Four Ways to Forgiveness
Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin's virginity.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976
I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Guardian, December 17, 2005
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven