American author (1929- )
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
The Lathe of Heaven
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
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
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
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
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
The Guardian, December 17, 2005
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
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
Tales from Earthsea
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
The Lathe of Heaven
When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Farthest Shore
A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tehanu
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013