Ursula K. Le Guin's Quotes

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

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

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

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

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

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

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

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

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.