Quote

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
Person
Freest
Ever
Bought
Thing
Loneliness
Solitude
Writer
Freedom
Free
Persons

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.
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What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
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I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The unread story is not a story it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
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For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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True understanding is the spur of genius
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Ursula K. Le Guin