Quote

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Work
Mystery
Think
Relationship
Thinking
Audience
Lying
Artist
Essentially
Art
Profit
Power
Artists
Even
Lies

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
Manipulated, one manipulates others.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
To be whole is to be part true voyage is return.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I do not care what comes after I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. 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
Image
And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles and I would be content.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin