Ursula K. Le Guin

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The light is the left hand of darkness.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.

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.

What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.

It win be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.