Quote

Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

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
Arrogance
Sufficient
Across
Necessary
Artist
Carries
Much
Carrie
Think
Equipment
Thinking
Gaps

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
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The king was pregnant.
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When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To make a thief, make an owner to create crime, create laws.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
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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There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
Ursula K. Le Guin