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.”

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the e...”

“The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.”

“We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the...”

“Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing” it? The little Time article its...”

“Hate's not functional; why are we taught it?”

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

“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”

“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.”

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

“He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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 pa...”

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

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

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