Quote

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

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
Thing
Writes
Long
Charge
Responsible
Paper
Writer
Alone
Enough
Pencil
Writing
Pencils

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
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
To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You cannot blame everything on the enemy.
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
Go to bed tired is stupid.
Ursula K. Le Guin