Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Writing, Mean

  "A Few Words to a Young Writer" by Ursula K. Le Guin, www.ursulakleguin.com. 2008.

• 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

  Suicide, Taken, Writing

  "Prospects for Women in Writing" (speech), Portland, Me., Sept. 1986

• 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.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Hard Work, Writing, Waiting

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.200, Grove Press

• There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Library, Stories

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.31, Ultramarine Publishing

• 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.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.198, Grove Press

• The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Stories, Plot

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.123, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Inspirational, Motivational, Graduation

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.151, Penguin

• Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Truth, Lying, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.8, Penguin

• You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Down And

• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

• Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Done, Noise

• Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Writing, Swings

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Technology, Fiction

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.169, Grove Press

• In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Running, Writing, Blood

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.30, Grove Press

• I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Thinking, Names

• A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Kids, Upset

• I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fun, Writing, Thinking

  Teenreads Interview, www.teenreads.com. September 2006.

• Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Kids, Simple

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.54, Ultramarine Publishing

• Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Giving, Empathy

• After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Writing, Men

• A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Jobs, Spring, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.198, Grove Press

• Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Beautiful, Letting Go, Writing

• To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Jobs, Writing, Thinking

• The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Long, Paper

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.236, Grove Press

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