42 Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin about Writing
- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.
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- Author Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
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