Quote

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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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
Though
Write
Censor
Tell
Quiet
Character
Listen
Writing
Writer
People
Fiction
Control
Talk

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
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Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
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Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
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Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
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To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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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
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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
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Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
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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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When I'm writing I don't dream much it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.
Ursula K. Le Guin