Writer Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

As a writer, you are free.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“Fact is one of our finest fictions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

We read books to find out who we are.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

By and large books are mankind's best invention.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I write with all my heart

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— 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

“A writer's moral duty is to use language thoughtfully and well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how…

— 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

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course,…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“I tend to avoid fiction about dysfunctional urban middle-class people written in the present tense. This makes it hard to find a…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

It's probably simply a matter of temperament that I never stopped to wonder if I could "match" what I had done, never…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“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

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

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag,…

— 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

No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten, she gets dropped…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

...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

“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

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

— 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

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin