Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it… — 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… — 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;… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
“The social function of narrative is not limited to 'primitive' people sitting around the fire telling each other where Fire came from… — 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
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices. — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
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 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
“The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter… — Ursula K. Le Guin Copy Share Image
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before… — 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
“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
“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
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it… — 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
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
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
“...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
