Top 30 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an art

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they’re not blueprints for action, ever.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they’re not blueprints for action, ever.
Ursula K. Le Guin
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
Ursula K. Le Guin
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
Ursula K. Le Guin
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I do try to separate my personal activism – showing up at a demonstration or something – from what I write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I don’t teach writing classes anymore, and I’m really glad I don’t, because I would feel very strange about telling people, ‘Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.’
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There are no right answers to wrong questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There’s a good deal in common between the mind’s eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Ursula K. Le Guin