Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the greatest novelists working in science fiction and fantasy. She is the author of The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of Earthsea, and The Lathe of Heaven. She influenced writers as varied as Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood, and was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
“The creative adult is the child who has survived.”
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
“To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”
“Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.”
“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.”
“You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.”
“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
“The story is not in the plot but in the telling.”