Quote

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

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
Need
Whenever
Children
Smile
Needs
Writers
Writing
Offers
Caterer
Going
Writer
Politely
Think
Sort
Shut
Thinking
Tell
Offer
Book
Plenty

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Greed puts out the sun.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Ignorant power is a bane!
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
One must work with time and not against it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
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
We broke the world to make it whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin