URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES V

American author (1929- )

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

foreward, Tales from Earthsea

Tags: present


If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: Charles Darwin


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

Tags: choice


Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: change


Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: fear


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 think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination


Go to bed; tired is stupid.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: sleep


Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Tags: art


There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: cats


Nothing succeeds like success.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: revolution


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

Tags: patriotism


They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit's strength lies in holding fast to the truth.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Eye of the Heron"

Tags: violence


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"


It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed


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

Tags: art


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


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

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Tags: writing