See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is… — 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
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather… — 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
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
Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write.… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and… — 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
“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
“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
“Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like—what's going on—what the weather is now, today,… — 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
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
“...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
“Hector had no virtue?” “Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one.” “We all do,” Aeneas remarked.” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?” — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
