I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live:… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 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
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 Copy Share Image
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures,… — 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
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
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future,… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till… — 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
“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
“...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