Books Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

We read books to find out who we are.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“a book is a box of words until you open it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

By and large books are mankind's best invention.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The great authors share their souls with us- "literally.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“She told Everra that he had given her and Sallo the soul's hunger for books and thoughts, and must not deprive them…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Contrast J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“talking about the “meaning” of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it. The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“I know who you are," she said. "You're my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“THINKING about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

— Ursula K. Le Guin