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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 22

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It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Men, Weapons, Either Or
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Tehanu: Book Four”, p.190, Simon and Schuster

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Teaching, Writing, Marketing
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.253, Shambhala Publications

Progress means nothing to presence.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Mean, Progress

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Song, Believe, Character
Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.102, Ultramarine Publishing

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Doe, Fiction, Knows

I write with all my heart

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Heart, My Heart

Even a poet cannot get everything right.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Poet
Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.262, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre Is, Used, Genre

That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Kings, Trying, Dueling

I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Book, Mean, Careers
Source: www.guernicamag.com

It's probably simply a matter of temperament that I never stopped to wonder if I could "match" what I had done, never choked off my writing by competing with myself, or with anybody else for that matter. My ambition was absolutely centered on the work itself, never on what it would bring me, or "who" it would make me. I never cared about that at all.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Ambition, Done
Source: www.guernicamag.com

I gather that a lot of the "pots" in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Museums, Black
Source: www.guernicamag.com

The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Mean, Marketing, Exclusion
Source: www.guernicamag.com

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