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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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
Stories
Writing
Plot
Telling
Story
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
Ursula K. Le Guin
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
