Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
War
Thing
Opposite
Opposites
Degrees
Civilization
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
Ursula K. Le Guin
One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We read books to find out who we are.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
