Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

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.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

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

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

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

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.