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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes about Writing

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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

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.

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

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

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Sex, Lying, Writing
Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.197, Shambhala Publications

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

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

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Jobs, Nice, Writing

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

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Kids, Upset

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Careers, Virginia

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

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

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

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, Writing, Skills
Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Children, Book, Writing
"A Message About Messages". Personal website, www.ursulakleguin.com.

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

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Done, Noise

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

What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing, Practice, Voice
Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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