American author (1929- )
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
There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
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"
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"
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin's virginity.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"The Space Crone", Co-Evolution Quarterly, summer 1976
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
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
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
Where there's property, there's theft.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, Salon, November 17, 2014