URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES V

American author (1929- )

One swallow does not make a summer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: summer


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


Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


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


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


Go to bed; tired is stupid.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: sleep


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


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

Tags: morality


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


There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader--and the writer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, Electric Lit, August 7, 2014


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


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


Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

City of Illusions

Tags: truth


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


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


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'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

Tags: pain


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


Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: physics