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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

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Fiction Writers, At Least

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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!

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Fake Realism Is The Escapist Literature Of Our Time. And Probably The Ultimate Escapist Reading Is That Masterpiece Of Total Unreality, The Daily Stock Market Report.

What Is Life Without Incompatible Realities?

Injustice Makes The Rules, And Courage Breaks Them.

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

Dead Anarchists Make Martyrs, You Know, And Keep Living For Centuries. But Absent Ones Can Be Forgotten.

Despair Speaks Evenly, In A Quiet Voice.

Writers Are Egotists. All Artists Are. They Can’t Be Altruists And Get Their Work Done. And Writers Love To Whine About The Solitude Of The Author’s Life, And Lock Themselves Into Cork-lined Rooms Or Droop Around In Bars In Order To Whine Better. But Although Most Writing Is Done In Solitude, I Believe That It Is Done, Like All The Arts, For An Audience. That Is To Say, With An Audience. All The Arts Are Performance Arts, Only Some Of Them Are Sneakier About It Than Others.

But Now His Dry And Silent Grieving For His Lost Wife Must End, For There She Stood, The Fierce, Recalcitrant, And Fragile Stranger, Forever To Be Won Again.

It Did Not Matter, After All. He Was Only One Man. One Man's Fate Is Not Important. "if It Is Not, What Is?" He Could Not Endure Those Remembered Words.

Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance.

If Science Fiction Is The Mythology Of Modern Technology, Then Its Myth Is Tragic.

The Artist Deals With 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.

See, The Thing Is, As A Writer You Are Free. You Are About The Freest Person That Ever Was. Your Freedom Is What You Have Bought With Your Solitude, Your Loneliness.

Is It The Gods Who Set This Fire In Our Hearts, Or Do We Each Make Our Fierce Desire Into A God?

Almost Everything Is Double Like That For Adolescents; Their Lies Are True And Their Truths Are Lies, And Their Hearts Are Broken By The World. They Gyre And Fall; They See Through Everything, And Are Blind.

To Know There Is A Choice Is To Have To Make The Choice: Change Or Stay: River Or Rock.

True Myths May Serve For Thousands Of Years As An Inexhaustible Source Of Intellectual Speculation, Religious Joy, Ethical Inquiry, And Artistic Renewal. The Real Mystery Is Not Destroyed By Reason. The Fake One Is. You Look At It And It Vanishes. You Look At The Blonde Hero-really Look-and He Turns Into A Gerbil. But You Look At Apollo, And He Looks Back At You. The Poet Rilke Looked At A Statue Of Apollo About Fifty Years Ago, And Apollo Spoke To Him. "you Must Change Your Life," He Said. When The True Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

The Question Is Always The Same With A Dragon: Will He Talk With You Or Will He Eat You?

Growing Up During World War Ii Certainly Affected My Whole View Of Life, But I Hardly Know How, It Goes So Deep. What's Hard To Explain Now Is That, Though We Were Never Invaded, And Bombed Only Once And Ineffectively On The Coast Of Oregon, Everybody In The Country Was In That War. Everything We Did Was Influenced By It - Eating, Traveling, Dressing, Thinking - Everything In Daily Life.

Artists Are People Who Are Not At All Interested In The Facts - Only In The Truth.

You Are All In Jail. Each Alone, Solitary, With A Heap Of What He Owns. You Live In Prison, Die In Prison. It Is All I Can See In Your Eyes - The Wall, The Wall!

Love Doesn't Just Sit There, Like A Stone; It Has To Be Made, Like Bread, Remade All The Time, Made New.

As A Writer, You Are Free.

Art Is Action. The Way I Live My Life To Its Highest Degree Is By Writing, The Practice Of Art.

We Like To Think We Live In Daylight, But Half The World Is Always Dark, And Fantasy, Like Poetry, Speaks The Language Of The Night.

If You Want To Know All About The Sea ... And Ask The Sea Itself, What Does It Say? Grumble Grumble Swish Swish. It Is Too Busy Being Itself To Know Anything About Itself.

Realism Is A Very Sophisticated Form Of Literature, A Very Grown-up One. And That May Be Its Weakness. But Fantasy Seems To Be Eternal And Omnipresent And Always Attractive To Kids.

... The Habit Of Literature [is] The Best Defense Against Believing The Half-truths Of Ideologues And The Lies Of Demagogues.

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.

Music Is Another Way Of Thinking, Or Maybe Thinking Is Another Kind Of Music.

All Men Were Alien One To Another, At Times, Not Only Aliens.

We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are. What Other People, Real Or Imaginary, Do And Think And Feel... Is An Essential Guide To Our Understanding Of What We Ourselves Are And May Become.

The Notion That A Story Has A Message Assumes That It Can Be Reduced To A Few Abstract Words, Neatly Summarized In A School Or College Examination Paper Or A Brisk Critical Review.

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.

If A Book Were Written All In Numbers, It Would Be True. It Would Be Just. Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together. But Underneath The Words, At The Center, Like The Center Of The Square, It All Came Out Even. Everything Could Change, Yet Nothing Would Be Lost. If You Saw The Numbers You Could See That, The Balance, The Pattern. You Saw The Foundations Of The World. And They Were Solid.

In General She Had Found That The Main Drawback In Being A Man Was That Conversations Were Less Interesting.

Death And Life Are The Same Thing-like The Two Sides Of My Hand, The Palm And The Back. And Still The Palm And The Back Are Not The Same...they Can Be Neither Separated, Nor Mixed.

To Break A Promise Is To Deny The Reality Of The Past. Therefore It Is To Deny The Hope Of A Real Future.

A Writer Either Speaks To Adults And Bores Kids, Or Speaks To Kids And Upsets Adults.

What Good Is Power When You're Too Wise To Use It?

I Came Into Science Fiction At A Very Good Time, When The Doors Were Getting Thrown Open To All Kinds Of More Experimental Writing, More Literary Writing, Riskier Writing. It Wasn't All Imitation Heinlein Or Asimov. And Of Course, Women Were Creeping In, Infiltrating. Infesting The Premises.

She Had Always Known That All Lives Are In Common, Rejoicing In Her Kinship To The Fish In The Tanks Of Her Laboratories, Seeking The Experience Of Existences Outside The Human Boundary.

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.

Success Is Somebody Else's Failure. Success Is The American Dream We Can Keep Dreaming Because Most People In Most Places, Including Thirty Million Of Ourselves, Live Wide Awake In The Terrible Reality Of Poverty.

Almost Anything Carried To A Logical Extreme Becomes Depressing.

Sci-fi Uses The Images That Sf - Starting With H.g. Wells - Made Familiar: Space Travel, Aliens, Galactic Wars And Federations, Time Machines, Et Cetera, Taking Them Literally, Not Caring If They Are Possible Or Even Plausible. It Has No Interest In Or Relation To Real Science Or Technology. It's Fantasy In Space Suits. Spectacle. Wizards With Lasers. Kids With Ray Guns. I've Written Both, But I Have To Say I Respect Science Fiction Enough That I Wince When People Call It Sci-fi.

Living In A World That Is Valued Only As Gain, An Ever-expanding World-as-frontier That Has No Worth Of Its Own, No Fullness Of Its Own, You Live In Danger Of Losing Your Own Worth To Yourself. That's When You Begin To Listen To The Voices From The Other Side, And To Ask Questions Of Failure And The Dark.

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.

The Children Of The Revolution Are Always Ungrateful, And The Revolution Must Be Grateful That It Is So.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.

So The First Step Out Of Childhood Is Made All At Once, Without Looking Before Or Behind, Without Caution, And Nothing Held In Reserve.

But Need Alone Is Not Enough To Set Power Free: There Must Be Knowledge.

My Imagination Makes Me Human And Makes Me A Fool; It Gives Me All The World, And Exiles Me From It.

In War Everybody Is A Prisoner.

Meeting Writers Is Always So Disappointing. I Got Over Wanting To Meet Live Writers Quite A Long Time Ago. There Is This Terrific Book That Has Changed Your Life, And Then You Meet The Author, And He Has Shifty Eyes And Funny Shoes And He Won't Talk About Anything Except The Injustice Of The United States Income Tax Structure Toward People With Fluctuating Income, Or How To Breed Black Angus Cows, Or Something.

A Forest Ecology Is A Delicate One. If The Forest Perishes, Its Fauna May Go With It. The Athshean Word For World Is Also The Word For Forest.

O Foolish Writer. Now Moves. Even In Storytime, Dreamtime, Once-upon-a-time, Now Isn't Then.

What Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up

Do You Know How To Read?" "no. It Is One Of The Black Arts." He Nodded. "but A Useful One," He Said.

They Can Send Death At Once, But Life Is Slower.

Nothing Is Yours. It Is To Use. It Is To Share. If You Will Not Share It, You Cannot Use It.

I Had Forgotten How Much Light There Is In The World, Till You Gave It Back To Me.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

I Suppose The Most Important Thing, The Heaviest Single Factor In One's Life, Is Whether One's Born Male Or Female. In Most Societies It Determines One's Expectations, Activities, Outlook, Ethics, Manners - Almost Everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic Usages. Clothing. Even Food. Women... Women Tend To Eat Less... It's Extremely Hard To Separate The Innate Differences From The Learned Ones. Even Where Women Participate Equally With Men In The Society, They Still After All Do All The Childbearing, And So Most Of The Child-rearing.

Progress Means Nothing To Presence.

When In The Land Of Property Think Like A Propertarian. Dress Like One, Eat Like One, Act Like One, Be One.

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

Dreams Take Short Cuts.

Animals Do Neither Good Nor Evil. They Do As They Must Do.we May Call What They Do Harmful Or Useful, But Good And Evil Belong To Us, Who Chose To Choose What We Do. [. . .] The Animals Need Only Be And Do.we're Yoked, And They're Free. So To Be With An Animal Is To Know A Little Freedom.

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.

Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

Honestly, Orthodoxy Concerns Me About As Much As It Concerns Your Average Jackrabbit. I Only Follow Rules That Take Me Where I Want To Go. If There Aren't Any Rules, I Make Up My Own And Follow Them Strictly.

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.

Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance. Old Age Is Similarly A Waiting Room, Where You Go After Life's Over And Wait For Cancer Or A Stroke. The Years Before And After The Menstrual Years Are Vestigial: The Only Meaningful Condition Left To Women Is That Of Fruitfulness.

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.

Do Remember, Though, That Unless You're A Playwright, The Result [dialogue] Isn't What You Want; It's Only An Element Of What You Want. Actors Embody And Re-create The Words Of Drama. In Fiction, A Tremendous Amount Of Story And Character May Be Given Through The Dialogue, But The Story-world And Its People Have To Be Created By The Storyteller. If There's Nothing In It But Disembodied Voices, Too Much Is Missing.

Stories Are What Death Thinks He Puts An End To. He Can't Understand That They End In Him, But They Don't End With Him.

When Action Grows Unprofitable, Gather Information; When Information Grows Unprofitable, Sleep.

At This Point, Realism Is Perhaps The Least Adequate Means Of Understanding Or Portraying The Incredible Realities Of Our Existence.

The Individual Cannot Bargain With The State. The State Recognizes No Coinage But Power: And It Issues The Coins Itself.

After A Long Time Spent Learning How To Write As A Woman Instead Of As An Honorary Man, I Was Able To Come Back To Earthsea And Write The Next Three Books In Another And Newer Tradition: That Of Questioning, Rather Than Accepting, The Gendering Of Power As Male.

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.

I Have Told The Story I Was Asked To Tell. I Have Closed It, As So Many Stories Close, With A Joining Of Two People. What Is One Man's And One Woman's Love And Desire, Against The History Of Two Worlds, The Great Revolutions Of Our Lifetimes, The Hope, The Unending Cruelty Of Our Species? A Little Thing. But A Key Is A Little Thing, Next To The Door It Opens. If You Lose The Key, The Door May Never Be Unlocked. It Is In Our Bodies That We Lose Or Begin Our Freedom, In Our Bodies That We Accept Or End Our Slavery. So I Wrote This Book For My Friend, With Whom I Have Lived And Will Die Free.

The Thing About Working With Time, Instead Of Against It, He Thought, Is That It Is Not Wasted. Even Pain Counts.

The Trouble Is That We Have A Bad Habit, Encouraged By Pedants And Sophisticates, Of Considering Happiness As Something Rather Stupid. Only Pain Is Intellectual, Only Evil Interesting. This Is The Treason Of The Artist: A Refusal To Admit The Banality Of Evil And The Terrible Boredom Of Pain.

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.

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.

Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.

The Only Thing That Makes Life Possible Is Permanent, Intolerable Uncertainty; Not Knowing What Comes Next.

A Machine Is More Blameless, More Sinless Even Than Any Animal. It Has No Intentions Whatsoever But Our Own.

The Important Thing Is Not The Finding, It Is The Seeking, It Is The Devotion With Which One Spins The Wheel Of Prayer And Scripture, Discovering The Truth Little By Little.

What Is The Use Trying To Describe The Flowing Of A River At Any One Moment, And Then At The Next Moment, And Then At The Next, And The Next, And The Next? You Wear Out. You Say: There Is A Great River, And It Flows Through This Land, And We Have Named It History.

If You Have To Find Devices To Coax Yourself To Stay Focused On Writing, Perhaps You Should Not Be Writing What You're Writing. And If This Lack Of Motivation Is A Constant Problem, Perhaps Writing Is Not Your Forte. I Mean, What Is The Problem? If Writing Bores You, That Is Pretty Fatal. If That Is Not The Case, But You Find That It Is Hard Going And It Just Doesn't Flow, Well, What Did You Expect? It Is Work; Art Is Work.

Sure, It's Simple, Writing For Kids... Just As Simple As Bringing Them Up.

George, It's Impossible To Correct A Defective Reality-orientation Overnight.

The Misogyny That Shapes Every Aspect Of Our Civilization Is The Institutionalized Form Of Male Fear And Hatred Of What They Have Denied And Therefore Cannot Know, Cannot Share: That Wild Country, The Being Of Women.

Sometimes One's Very Angry And Preaches, But I Know That To Clinch A Point Is To Close It. To Leave The Reader Free To Decide What Your Work Means, That's The Real Art; It Makes The Work Inexhaustible.

You Must Not Change One Thing, One Pebble, One Grain Of Sand, Until You Know What Good And Evil Will Follow On That Act.

If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself

All Makers Must Leave Room For Acts Of The Spirit.

One Must Work With Time And Not Against It.

The Pornography Of Violence Of Course Far Exceeds, In Volume And General Acceptance, Sexual Pornography, In This Puritan Land Of Ours.

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

The Same Old Hypocrisy. Life Is A Fight, And The Strongest Wins. All Civilization Does Is Hide The Blood And Cover Up The Hate With Pretty Words!

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.

Belief In The Lie Is The Life Of The Lie.

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.

I Do Not Care What Comes After; I Have Seen The Dragons On The Wind Of Morning.

There Are Very Real Differences Between Science Fiction And Realistic Fiction, Between Horror And Fantasy, Between Romance And Mystery. Differences In Writing Them, In Reading Them, In Criticizing Them. Vive Les Différences! They're What Gives Each Genre Its Singular Flavor And Savor, Its Particular Interest For The Reader - And The Writer.

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.

Ah, Genre. A Word Only A Frenchman Could Love.

Odonianism Is Anarchism. Not The Bomb-in-the-pocket Stuff, Which Is Terrorism, Whatever Name It Tries To Dignify Itself With, Not The Social-darwinist Economic 'libertarianism' Of The Far Right; But Anarchism, As Prefigured In Early Taoist Thought, And Expounded By Shelley And Kropotkin, Goldman And Goodman. Anarchism's Principal Target Is The Authoritarian State (capitalist Or Socialist); Its Principle Moral-practical Theme Is Cooperation (solidarity, Mutual Aid). It Is The Most Idealistic, And To Me The Most Interesting, Of All Political Theories.

It Is Of The Nature Of Idea To Be Communicated: Written, Spoken, Done. The Idea Is Like Grass. It Craves Light, Likes Crowds, Thrives On Crossbreeding, Grows Better For Being Stepped On.

That I Was Not Dueling With The King, But Trying To Communicate With Him, Was Itself An Incommunicable Fact.

Other People's Stories May Become Part Of Your Own, The Foundation Of It, The Ground It Goes On.

The Fish In The Creek Said Nothing. Fish Never Do. Few People Know What Fish Think About Injustice, Or Anything Else.

And Though I Came To Forget Or Regret All I Have Ever Done, Yet Would I Remember That Once I Saw The Dragons Aloft On The Wind At Sunset Above The Western Isles; And I Would Be Content.

I Use A Whole Lot Of Half-assed Semicolons; There Was One Of Them Just Now; That Was A Semicolon After 'semicolons,' And Another One After 'now.

A Scientist Can Pretend That His Work Isn't Himself, It's Merely The Impersonal Truth. An Artist Can't Hide Behind The Truth. He Can't Hide Anywhere.

What Good Is Music? None ... And That Is The Point. To The World And Its States And Armies And Factories And Leaders, Music Says, 'you Are Irrelevant'; And, Arrogant And Gentle As A God, To The Suffering Man It Says Only, 'listen.' For Being Saved Is Not The Point. Music Saves Nothing. Merciful, Uncaring, It Denies And Breaks Down All The Shelters, The Houses Men Build For Themselves, That They May See The Sky.

To Be Whole Is To Be Part; True Voyage Is Return.

For A Fiction Writer, A Storyteller, The World Is Full Of Stories, And When A Story Is There, It's There, And You Just Reach Up And Pick It.

When The Genuine Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.

Changing Your Life

The Reason Literacy Is Important Is That Literature Is The Operating Instructions. The Best Manual We Have. The Most Useful Guide To The Country We're Visiting, Life.

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words.

Before The Moon I Am, What A Woman Is, A Woman Of Power, A Woman's Power, Deeper Than The Roots Of Trees, Deeper Than The Roots Of Islands, Older Than The Making, Older Than The Moon.

What's Wrong With Men?" Tenar Inquired Cautiously. As Cautiously, Lowering Her Voice, Moss Replied, "i Don't Know, My Dearie. I've Thought On It. Often I've Thought On It. The Best I Can Say It Is Like This. A Man's In His Skin, See, Like A Nut In Its Shell." She Held Up Her Long, Bent, Wet Fingers As If Holding A Walnut. "it's Hard And Strong, That Shell, And It's All Full Of Him. Full Of Grand Man-meat, Man-self. And That's All. That's All There Is. It's All Him And Nothing Else, Inside.

Science Fiction Is Not Prescriptive; It Is Descriptive.

Science Fiction

There Have Been Great Societies That Did Not Use The Wheel, But There Have Been No Societies That Did Not Tell Stories.

Great Artists Make The Roads; Good Teachers And Good Companions Can Point Them Out. But There Ain't No Free Rides, Baby. No Hitchhiking. And If You Want To Strike Out In Any New Direction — You Go Alone. With A Machete In Your Hand And The Fear Of God In Your Heart.

In That Moment Ged Understood The Singing Of The Bird, And The Language Of The Water Falling In The Basin Of The Fountain, And The Shape Of The Clouds, And The Beginning And End Of The Wind That Stirred The Leaves; It Seemed To Him That He Himself Was A Word Spoken By The Sunlight.

Claude Levi-strauss Has Been A Great Source Of Fruitful Irritation To My Mind.

To Hear, One Must Be Silent.

The Airport Bookstore Did Not Sell Books, Only Bestsellers, Which Sita Dulip Cannot Read Without Risking A Severe Systemic Reaction.

I Think Hard Times Are Coming When We Will Be Wanting The Voices Of Writers Who Can See Alternatives To How We Live Now And Can See Through Our Fear-stricken Society And Its Obsessive Technologies To Other Ways Of Being, And Even Imagine Some Real Grounds For Hope. We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom. Poets, Visionaries-the Realists Of A Larger Reality.

We Broke The World To Make It Whole.

Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.

Nothing Remains The Same From One Moment To The Next, You Can't Step Into The Same River Twice. Life--evolution--the Whole Universe Of Space/time, Matter/energy--existence Itself--is Essentially Change.

Do You See, Arren, How An Act Is Not, As Young Men Think, Like A Rock That One Picks Up And Throws, And It Hits Or Misses, And That's The End Of It. When That Rock Is Lifted, The Earth Is Lighter; The Hand That Bears It Is Heavier. When It Is Thrown, The Circuits Of The Stars Respond, And Where It Strikes Or Falls The Universe Is Changed.

Men Call Women Faithless, Changeable, And Though They Say It In Jealousy Of Their Own Ever-threatened Sexual Honor, There Is Some Truth In It. We Can Change Our Life, Our Being; No Matter What Our Will Is, We Are Changed. As The Moon Changes Yet Is One, So We Are Virgin, Wife, Mother, Grandmother. For All Their Restlessness, Men Are Who They Are; Once They Put On The Man's Toga They Will Not Change Again; So They Make A Virtue Of That Rigidity And Resist Whatever Might Soften It And Set Them Free.

The Hunger Of A Dragon Is Slow To Wake, But Hard To Sate.

Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.

Art, Like Sex, Cannot Be Carried On Indefinitely Solo; After All, They Have The Same Enemy, Sterility.

I Doubt That The Imagination Can Be Suppressed. If You Truly Eradicated It In A Child, He Would Grow Up To Be An Eggplant.

A Man Would Know The End He Goes To, But He Cannot Know It If He Does Not Turn, And Return To His Beginning, And Hold That Beginning In His Being. If He Would Not Be A Stick Whirled And Whelmed In The Stream, He Must Be The Stream Itself, All Of It, From Its Spring To Its Sinking In The Sea.

It Is No Secret. All Power Is One In Source And End, I Think. Years And Distances, Stars And Candles, Water And Wind And Wizardry, The Craft In A Man's Hand And The Wisdom In A Tree's Root: They All Arise Together. My Name, And Yours, And The True Name Of The Sun, Or A Spring Of Water, Or An Unborn Child, All Are Syllables Of The Great Word That Is Very Slowly Spoken By The Shining Of The Stars. There Is No Other Power. No Other Name.

And I Needed A Rock. Something To Hold Onto, To Stand On. Something Solid. Because Everything Was Going Soft, Turning Into Mush, Into Marsh, Into Fog. Fog Closing In On All Sides. I Didn't Know Where I Was At All.

The Great Authors Share Their Souls With Us- "literally.

There Are Souls, He Thought, Whose Umbilicus Has Never Been Cut. They Never Got Weaned From The Universe. They Do Not Understand Death As An Enemy; They Look Forward To Rotting And Turning Into Humus.

The Book Itself Is A Curious Artifact, Not Showy In Its Technology But Complex And Extremely Efficient: A Really Neat Little Device, Compact, Often Very Pleasant To Look At And Handle, That Can Last Decades, Even Centuries. It Doesn't Have To Be Plugged In, Activated, Or Performed By A Machine; All It Needs Is Light, A Human Eye, And A Human Mind. It Is Not One Of A Kind, And It Is Not Ephemeral. It Lasts. It Is Reliable.

I've Got Some Gift For Languages. You Follow Your Gift. But Latin's Not Easy.

Part Of The Particular Interest And Beauty Of Science Fiction And Fantasy: Writer And Reader Collaborate In World-making.

Love Does Not Obey The Mind, And Turns To Hate When Forced.

It Is A Terrible Thing, This Kindess That Human Beings Do Not Lose. Terrible, Because When We Are Finally Naked In The Dark And Cold, It Is All We Have. We Who Are So Rich, So Full Of Strength, We End Up With That Small Change. We Have Nothing Else To Give.

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.

I Don't Write Tracts, I Write Novels. I'm Not A Preacher, I'm A Fiction Writer.

I Have No Control Over My Writing. I Have Lots Of Good Intentions, But No Control. There's A Story That Wants To Be Told.

Statesmen Remember Things Selectively.

If We Can Get That Realistic Feminine Morality Working For Us, If We Can Trust Ourselves And So Let Women Think And Feel That An Unwanted Child Or An Oversize Family Is Wrong -- Not Ethically Wrong, Not Against The Rules, But Morally Wrong, All Wrong, Wrong Like A Thalidomide Birth, Wrong Like Taking A Wrong Step That Will Break Your Neck -- If We Can Get Feminine And Human Morality Out From Under The Yoke Of A Dead Ethic, Then Maybe We'll Begin To Get Somewhere On The Road That Leads To Survival.

Age And Illness Made One A Dualist

When We're Done With It, We May Find—if It's A Good Novel—that We're A Bit Different From What We Were Before We Read It, That We Have Been Changed A Little, As If By Having Meet A New Face, Crossed A Street We've Never Crossed Before.

Dragons Are More Dangerous, And A Good Deal Commoner, Than Bears. Fantasy Is Nearer To Poetry, To Mysticism, And To Insanity Than Naturalistic Fiction Is. It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

If Your Voice Is Heard By More People Because You've Earned Some Kind Of Name And Fame, Your Silence On An Issue Of Urgent Moral Importance Is Even More Of A Betrayal. Privilege Is Obligation.

The Word Must Be Heard In Silence; There Must Be Darkness To See The Stars.

No Matter How Intelligent A Man Is, He Can't See What He Doesn't Know How To See.

It Is Very Hard For Evil To Take Hold Of The Unconsenting Soul.

No Darkness Lasts Forever. And Even There, There Are Stars.

Having One King, One God, One Belief, They Can Act Single-mindedly.

Paradise Is For Those Who Make Paradise.

I Am No More Lonely Than The Loon On The Pond That Laughs So Loud.

The Island Of Gont, A Single Mountain That Lifts Its Peak A Mile Above The Storm-racked Northeast Sea, Is A Land Famous For Wizards.

Scientific Truth Will Out, You Can't Hide The Sun Under A Stone.

Resistance And Change Often Begin In Art, And Very Often In Our Art - The Art Of Words.

You Know, I Don't Think A Lot About Why One Book Connects With Its Readers And Another Doesn't. Probably Because I Don't Want To Start Thinking, "am I Popular?" I Spent Way Too Much Time Thinking About That In High School.

Freedom Is A Heavy Load, A Great And Strange Burden For The Spirit To Undertake. It Is Not Easy. It Is Not A Gift Given, But A Choice Made, And The Choice May Be A Hard One. The Road Goes Upward Towards The Light; But The Laden Traveler May Never Reach The End Of It.

Genre Is A Useful Concept Only When Used Not Evaluatively But Descriptively.

Greed Puts Out The Sun.

Even The Best Weapon Is An Unhappy Tool, Hateful To Living Things. So The Follower Of The Way Stays Away From It. Weapons Are Unhappy Tools, Not Chosen By Thoughtful People, To Be Used Only When There Is No Choice, And With A Calm, Still Mind, Without Enjoyment. To Enjoy Using Weapons Is To Enjoy Killing People, And To Enjoy Killing People Is To Lose Your Share In The Common Good. It Is Right That The Murder Of Many People Be Mourned And Lamented. It Is Right That A Victor In War Be Received With Funeral Ceremonies.

Most Civilisations, Perhaps, Look Shinier In General Terms And From Several Light-years Away.

In Our Loss And Fear We Craved The Acts Of Religion, The Ceremonies That Allow Us To Admit Our Helplessness, Our Dependence On The Great Forces We Do Not Understand.

It Is Not Altogether A Bad Thing To Have Criminal Ancestors. An Arsonist Grandfather May Bequeath One A Nose For Smelling Smoke.

We Sleep Researchers Like Cats, You Know; They Sleep A Lot!

You Have To Help Another Person. But It's Not Right To Play God With Masses Of People. To Be God You Have To Know What You're Doing. And To Do Any Good At All, Just Believing You're Right And Your Motives Are Good Isn't Enough.

I Can Never Get Used To The Fact, Though I Know It, That Women Are Born Cynics. Men Have To Learn Cynicism. Infant Girls Could Teach It To Them.

Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together.

If A Book Told You Something When You Were Fifteen, It Will Tell You It Again When You're Fifty, Though You May Understand It So Differently That It Seems You're Reading A Whole New Book.

Certainly The Effort To Remain Unchanged, Young, When The Body Gives So Impressive A Signal Of Change As The Menopause, Is Gallant; But It Is A Stupid, Self-sacrificial Gallantry, Better Befitting A Boy Of Twenty Than A Woman Of Forty-five Or Fifty. Let The Athletes Die Young And Laurel-crowned. Let The Soldiers Earn The Purple Hearts. Let Women Die Old, White-crowned, With Human Hearts.

When The Enemy Enthusiastically Embraces You, And The Fellow Countrymen Bitterly Reject You, It Is Hard Not To Wonder If You Are, In Fact, A Traitor.

Her Work, I Really Think Her Work Is Finding What Her Real Work Is And Doing It, Her Work, Her Own Work, Her Being Human, Her Being In The World.

I Think The Mystery Of Art Lies In This, That Artists’ Relationship Is Essentially With Their Work — Not With Power, Not With Profit, Not With Themselves, Not Even With Their Audience.

Yet We Were Rescued By That Fancy, And Saved By A Myth.

The Danger In Trying To Do Good Is That The Mind Comes To Confuse The Intent Of Goodness With The Act Of Doing Things Well.

From That Time Forth He Believed That The Wise Man Is One Who Never Sets Himself Apart From Other Living Things, Whether They Have Speech Or Not, And In Later Years He Strove Long To Learn What Can Be Learned, In Silence, From The Eyes Of Animals, The Flight Of Birds, The Great Slow Gestures Of Trees.

Legends Of Prediction Are Common Throughout The Whole Household Of Man. Gods Speak, Spirits Speak, Computers Speak. Oracular Ambiguity Or Statistical Probability Provides Loopholes, And Discrepancies Are Expunged By Faith.

In Innocence There Is No Strength Against Evil, Said Sparrowhawk, A Little Wryly. But There Is Strength In It For Good.

Much Arrogance Is Necessary Equipment For An Artist, I Think. Not Sufficient, But Necessary. It Carries One Across The Gaps.

The Machine Conceals The Machinations.

To Be Oneself Is A Rare Thing, And A Great One.

What Is A Woman's Power Then?" She Asked. "i Don't Think We Know." "when Has A Woman Power Because She's A Woman? With Her Children, I Suppose. For A While..." "in Her House, Maybe." She Looked Around The Kitchen. "but The Doors Are Shut," She Said, "the Doors Are Locked." "because You're Valuable." "oh Yes. We're Precious. So Long As We're Powerless.

What Goes Too Long Unchanged Destroys Itself.

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