Quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

In war everybody is a prisoner.

Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.

In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil.

Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.

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

Anyhow they're always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.

I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.

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

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

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.

It is useless work that darkens the heart.

One must work with time and not against it.

Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists' relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.