42 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin about Writing
- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy the story up but to tone it down. The fact is, the world is unbelievably strange and human behavior is frequently so weird that no kind of narrative except farce or satire can handle it. The function of the storyteller's imagination sometimes is simply to make it more plausible.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive … But our society, being troubled and bewildered, seeking guidance, sometimes puts an entirely mistaken trust in [science fiction authors], using them as prophets and futurologists.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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Amazing Stories Mag: What does your writing process look like?Ursula K. Le Guin: It looks like a woman sitting at a desk, or staring out a window, or cooking dinner, or waking up in the morning, or whatever. You know what a ground bass is in music? A theme that keeps going on underneath, no matter what else is happening on top of it? Writing is the ground bass of my existence.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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It seems you can only describe beauty by describing something else, the way you can only see the earliest star after sunset by not looking directly at it.
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If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy. [It's the writer's] pleasant duty is to ply the reader’s imagination with the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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The social function of narrative is not limited to 'primitive' people sitting around the fire telling each other where Fire came from and why they're sitting around it.
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