URSULA K. LE GUIN QUOTES V

American author (1929- )

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


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

URSULA K. LE GUIN

foreward, Tales from Earthsea

Tags: present


To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"A Man of the People", Four Ways to Forgiveness

Tags: choice


For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination


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

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination


Go to bed; tired is stupid.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Wizard of Earthsea

Tags: sleep


Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: change


One swallow does not make a summer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Lathe of Heaven

Tags: summer


They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit's strength lies in holding fast to the truth.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Eye of the Heron"

Tags: violence


Nothing succeeds like success.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness


Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination


When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: poetry


No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: patriotism


Violence gains nothing, killing wins nothing -- only sometimes nothing is what people want. Death is what they want. And they get it.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"The Eye of the Heron"


Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: fear


Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Dispossessed

Tags: revolution


To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Guardian, December 17, 2005

Tags: art


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

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Tags: writing


Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness

Tags: prophecy


It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

Tales from Earthsea