Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

About Ursula K. Le Guin:

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Ursula K. Le Guin

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

Ursula K. Le Guin

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

Ursula K. Le Guin

To oppose something is to maintain it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Ursula K. Le Guin

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Ursula K. Le Guin

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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.'

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Ursula K. Le Guin

Author Bio

  • NameUrsula K. Le Guin
  • DescriptionAmerican writer known best for speculative fiction
  • AliasesUrsula Kroeber
  • BornOctober 21, 1929
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Translator; Novelist; Poet
  • WorksEarthsea Series; Hainish Cycle
  • AwardsMargaret Edwards Award; Nebula Award; Prometheus Award - Hall Of Fame