URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES V

American author (1929- )

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

Tags: fantasy


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

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


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


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


Go to bed; tired is stupid.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: sleep


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


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


One swallow does not make a summer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: summer


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


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


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


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"


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


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


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


Nothing succeeds like success.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


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 you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: poetry


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