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I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Therefore
Talk
Artist
Liar
Truth
Distrust
Everything
Liars
Atheist
Gods
Telling

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
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Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.
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Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
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Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
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I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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Success is somebody else's failure.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
Ursula K. Le Guin