Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

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Ursula K. Le Guin

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 21, 1929

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin