American author (1929- )
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
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
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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"
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
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
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea
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
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
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
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
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 succeeds like success.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
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
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
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
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