Quotes By Ursula K. Le Guin

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

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

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

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

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.

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

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

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

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.

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

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

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

To oppose something is to maintain it.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.

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

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

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.

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.

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.

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