American author (1929- )
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
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The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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
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
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
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
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
Nothing succeeds like success.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader, & the Imagination
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Salon, November 17, 2014
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
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
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
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
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed