American author (1929- )
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"
It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Tombs of Atuan
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
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
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
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
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
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
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
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
Nothing succeeds like success.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
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"
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
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
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
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness