It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
Interpretation
What this quote means
Ursula K. Le Guin expresses her discomfort with encouraging people to pursue writing as a career, reflecting on the challenges of the profession.
In this quote, Ursula K. Le Guin conveys her ambivalence about teaching writing and encouraging aspiring authors to seek a living in the field. She acknowledges the difficulties that come with the writing profession and the potential disillusionment that can accompany the pursuit of such a creative endeavor. Rather than promoting the romantic notion of being a successful writer, she seems to advocate for a more realistic understanding of the challenges writers face.
Themes
WritingCareerChallengesCreativityRealism
In practice
Example use cases
In a workshop on creative writing, I cited Le Guin to emphasize the realities of pursuing a writing career.
More from Ursula K. Le Guin
All quotes →In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Similar quotes
I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Zadie SmithRead
We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
Walter Dean MyersRead
It is like a voyage of discovery into unknown lands, seeking not for new territory but for new knowledge. It should appeal to those with a good sense of adventure.
Frederick SangerRead
I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
Jacqueline WoodsonRead
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray BradburyRead
When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.
Susan VreelandRead