American author (1929- )
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
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"
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
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
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
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
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
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
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
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
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
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
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