“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices...… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“...I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
