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 reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Sci-fi uses the images that sf - starting with H.G. Wells - made familiar: space travel, aliens, galactic wars and federations, time… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you… — 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