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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

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
Thing
Loneliness
Solitude
Writer
Freedom
Free
Persons
Person
Freest
Ever
Bought

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
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It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.
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If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
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Progress means nothing to presence.
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer and his sons are born in exile.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
Ursula K. Le Guin