Ursula K. Le Guin (Writer)

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

— Ursula K. Le Guin truth

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

— Ursula K. Le Guin light

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

— Ursula K. Le Guin you

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

— Ursula K. Le Guin war

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

— Ursula K. Le Guin truth

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

— Ursula K. Le Guin science

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

— Ursula K. Le Guin children

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

— Ursula K. Le Guin reading

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin action

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, dont marry and have kids, and above all, dont die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

— Ursula K. Le Guin writing

Ive got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latins not easy.

— Ursula K. Le Guin language

If you see a whole thing - it seems that its always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a worlds all dirt and rocks. And day to day, lifes a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there aint no free rides, baby.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

— Ursula K. Le Guin hope

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

— Ursula K. Le Guin hope

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

— Ursula K. Le Guin imagination

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I certainly wasnt happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you cant earn, and cant keep, and often dont even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

— Ursula K. Le Guin happiness

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

— Ursula K. Le Guin music

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

— Ursula K. Le Guin self

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but theyre not blueprints for action, ever.

— Ursula K. Le Guin reading

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

— Ursula K. Le Guin hope

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

— Ursula K. Le Guin power

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

— Ursula K. Le Guin right

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

— Ursula K. Le Guin demons

I dont write tracts, I write novels. Im not a preacher, Im a fiction writer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin fiction

I dont teach writing classes anymore, and Im really glad I dont, because I would feel very strange about telling people, Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin writing

Theres a good deal in common between the minds eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

— Ursula K. Le Guin dreams

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

— Ursula K. Le Guin power

Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.

— Ursula K. Le Guin freedom

To see that your life is a story while youre in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she cant. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesnt believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. Shes a male construct, and shes afraid women will deconstruct her. Shes afraid of everything, because she cant change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and shes my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.

— Ursula K. Le Guin women

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

— Ursula K. Le Guin history

Even a poet cannot get everything right.

— Ursula K. Le Guin poet

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

— Ursula K. Le Guin thought

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

— Ursula K. Le Guin men

Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.

— Ursula K. Le Guin experience

If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe well begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.

— Ursula K. Le Guin women

Success is somebody elses failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

— Ursula K. Le Guin success

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that theres nothing to be afraid of if youve stockpiled lots of dried fruit.

— Ursula K. Le Guin sex

You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.

— Ursula K. Le Guin self

If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. Its only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

— Ursula K. Le Guin god

Besides, when you say youre a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, its kind of irresistible.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

— Ursula K. Le Guin freedom

There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.

— Ursula K. Le Guin sin

We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when youre not, what does that mean? Maybe that youre afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

— Ursula K. Le Guin war

There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.

— Ursula K. Le Guin writing

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

— Ursula K. Le Guin knowledge

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country were visiting, life.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

— Ursula K. Le Guin religion

Hope is a slow business.

— Ursula K. Le Guin hope

The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.

— Ursula K. Le Guin hope

The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?

— Ursula K. Le Guin you

Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

— Ursula K. Le Guin poetry

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

— Ursula K. Le Guin war

Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say Im sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin time

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

— Ursula K. Le Guin self

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

What is love of ones country; is it hate of ones uncountry? Then its not a good thing.

— Ursula K. Le Guin love

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

— Ursula K. Le Guin you

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

— Ursula K. Le Guin funny

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. Theres a story that wants to be told.

— Ursula K. Le Guin writing

Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.

— Ursula K. Le Guin freedom

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.

— Ursula K. Le Guin women

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.

— Ursula K. Le Guin reality

No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten, she gets dropped from the lists, the courses, the anthologies, while the men get kept. ... If she had the nerve to have children, her chances of getting dropped are higher still. ... So if you want your writing to be taken seriously, dont marry and have kids, and above all, dont die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

— Ursula K. Le Guin love

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.

— Ursula K. Le Guin books

If your voice is heard by more people because youve earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.

— Ursula K. Le Guin people

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.

— Ursula K. Le Guin sex

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

— Ursula K. Le Guin time

there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.

— Ursula K. Le Guin time

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

— Ursula K. Le Guin self

Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

— Ursula K. Le Guin truth

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they dont know they want and dont think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

— Ursula K. Le Guin writing

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

— Ursula K. Le Guin time

Well, the secret to writing is writing. Its only a secret to people who dont want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin writing

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.

— Ursula K. Le Guin art

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and shed sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That wont sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

— Ursula K. Le Guin poetry

Things dont have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. Whats the function of a galaxy? I dont know if our life has a purpose and I dont see that it matters. What does matter is that were a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

— Ursula K. Le Guin life

A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes witness, if those with him saw nothing.

— Ursula K. Le Guin man

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

— Ursula K. Le Guin light

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

— Ursula K. Le Guin sin

No matter how intelligent a man is, he cant see what he doesnt know how to see.

— Ursula K. Le Guin man

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

— Ursula K. Le Guin war

One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.

— Ursula K. Le Guin man

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

— Ursula K. Le Guin power

Dreams take short cuts.

— Ursula K. Le Guin dreams

Id rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin lies

Paradise is for those who make paradise.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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