Quote

The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.

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
Like
Except
Exclusion
Cost
Publishers
Security
Label
Actually
Literary
Means
Consideration
Young
Labels
Nothing
Marketing
Protagonists
Mean
Secure
Niche

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Statesmen remember things selectively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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
Image
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
They can send death at once, but life is slower.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Paradise is for those who make paradise.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
Ursula K. Le Guin