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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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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
Business
Honored
Charge
Salaried
Prophet
Prediction
Novelists
Uttered
Therefore
Fees
Usually
Prophets
Lying
Novelist
Free
Predictions

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In war everybody is a prisoner.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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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
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A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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
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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
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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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin