URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES VI

American author (1929- )

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

Tags: prophecy


When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


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


It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: pain


Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: sleep


I don't think science fiction is a very good name for it, but it's the name that we've got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is if I'm just called a sci-fi writer. I'm not. I'm a novelist and poet. Don't shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don't fit, because I'm all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: science fiction


The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tales from Earthsea


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


Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

Tags: fantasy


The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

City of Illusions


A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tehanu


A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Word for World is Forest

Tags: realism


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


When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Farthest Shore

Tags: action


The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven


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

Tags: religion


Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, Salon, November 17, 2014


To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Farthest Shore

Tags: power