Quote

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

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
Interest
Apathy
Making
Empathy
Science
Fantasy
Part
Reader
World
Writer
Fiction
Particular
Beauty
Collaborate

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I write with all my heart
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be it tells itself I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words and the writer's job is to be its medium.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
There's no way to use power for good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
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
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
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, Am I popular? I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.
Ursula K. Le Guin