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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.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

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If You Have To

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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.

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Science Fiction Is Not Predictive; It Is Descriptive.... Prediction Is The Business Of Prophets, Clairvoyants, And Futurologists. It Is Not The Business Of Novelists. A Novelist's Business Is Lying.... Open Your Eyes; Listen, Listen. That Is What The Novelists Say. But They Don't Tell You What You Will See And Hear. All They Can Tell You Is What They Have Seen And Heard, In Their Time In This World, A Third Of It Spent In Sleep And Dreaming, Another Third Of It Spent In Telling Lies.

One Of The Things [fiction] Does Is Lead You To Recognize What You Did Not Know Before.

As You Read A Book Word By Word And Page By Page, You Participate In Its Creation, Just As A Cellist Playing A Bach Suite Participates, Note By Note, In The Creation, The Coming-to-be, The Existence, Of The Music. And, As You Read And Re-read, The Book Of Course Participates In The Creation Of You, Your Thoughts And Feelings, The Size And Temper Of Your Soul.

Every Book Purchase Made From Amazon Is A Vote For A Culture Without Content And Without Contentment.

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.

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

A Writer Is A Person Who Cares What Words Mean, What They Say, How They Say It... By Using Words Well They Strengthen Their Souls.

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners.

Where There's Property, There's Theft.

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.

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.

Our Model Of The Cosmos Must Be As Inexhaustible As The Cosmos. A Complexity That Includes Not Only Duration But Creation, Not Only Being But Becoming, Not Only Geometry But Ethics. It Is Not The Answer We Are After, But Only How To Ask The Question.

Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.

As A Man's Real Power Grows And His Knowledge Widens, Ever The Way He Can Follow Grows Narrower: Until At Last He Chooses Nothing,but Does Only And Wholly What He Must Do.

What The Brain Does By Itself Is Infinitely More Fascinating And Complex Than Any Response It Can Make To Chemical Stimulation.

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.

If I Had To Pick A Hero, It Would Be Charles Darwin--the Size Of His Mind, Which Included All That Scientific Curiosity And Knowledge Seeking, And The Ability To Put It All Together. There Is A Genuine Spirituality About Darwin's Thinking.

We Scarcely Know How Much Of Our Pleasure And Interest In Life Comes To Us Through Our Eyes Until We Have To Do Without Them; And Part Of That Pleasure Is That The Eyes Can Choose Where To Look. But The Ears Can't Choose Where To Listen.

The Reader Can't Take Much For Granted In A Fiction Where The Scenery Can Eat The Characters.

To Learn Which Questions Are Unanswerable, And Not To Answer Them: This Skill Is Most Needful In Times Of Stress And Darkness.

Success Is Somebody Else's Failure.

Owning Is Owing, Having Is Hoarding.

People Who Deny The Existence Of Dragons Are Often Eaten By Dragons. From Within.

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.

Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings

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

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

Love's Just One Of The Ways Through, And It Can Go Wrong, And Miss. Pain Never Misses. But Therefore We Don't Have Much Choice About Enduring It! We Will, Whether We Want To Or Not.

Great Self-destruction Follows Upon Unfounded Fear.

Self Destruction

Alone, No One Wins Freedom.

When I Was Young, I Had To Choose Between The Life Of Being And The Life Of Doing. And I Leapt At The Latter Like A Trout To A Fly. But Each Deed You Do, Each Act, Binds You To Itself And To Its Consequences, And Makes You Act Again And Yet Again. Then Very Seldom Do You Come Upon A Space, A Time Like This, Between Act And Act, When You May Stop And Simply Be. Or Wonder Who, After All, You Are.

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

We Of Es Toch Tell A Little Myth, Which Says That In The Beginning The Creator Told A Great Lie. For There Was Nothing At All, But The Creator Spoke, Saying, It Exists. And Behold, In Order That The Lie Of God Might Be God's Truth, The Universe At Once Began To Exist.

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

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

Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

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.

Crankish Attacks On The Freedom To Read Are Common At Present. When Backed And Coordinated By Organized Groups, They Become Sinister.

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

All Makers Must Leave Room For Acts Of The Spirit.

The Menopause Is Probably The Least Glamorous Topic Imaginable; And This Is Interesting, Because It Is One Of The Very Few Topics To Which Cling Some Shreds And Remnants Of Taboo. A Serious Mention Of Menopause Is Usually Met With Uneasy Silence; A Sneering Reference To It Is Usually Met With Relieved Sniggers. Both The Silence And The Sniggering Are Pretty Sure Indications Of Taboo.

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

Everything Gives Way Before The Recurring Torment And Festivity Of Passion.

Genre Fiction Was Looked At As A Ghetto, But I Wonder Now If Realist Fiction, Sealing Itself Off In The Glum Suburbs Of A Dysfunctional Society, Denying The Use Of Imagination, Was The Ghetto.

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.

To See A Candle's Light One Must Take It Into A Dark Place.

There Is A Limited Number Of Plots. There Is No Limit To The Number Of Stories.

To Learn A Belief Without The Belief Is To Sing A Song Without The Tune.

What Children Don't Understand, And Can't Understand Until They Grow Up Some, Is How Much The Whole Fabric And Process Of Human Society Depends On Everybody Agreeing To Ignore, Most Of The Time, The Fact That All Of Us Are, Most Of The Time, Inadequate, Incompetent, Pitiful, And, In Fact, Naked To Our Enemies. None Of Us Really Has Very Much In The Way Of Spiritual, Moral Clothing. We Dress Ourselves In Rags. And We Agree To Say Nothing About It. To A Very Large Extent, It Is Human Charity That Clothes Us.

The Use Of Imaginative Fiction Is To Deepen Your Understanding Of Your World, And Your Fellow Men, And Your Own Feelings, And Your Destiny.

There Are Two Kinds Of Knowledge, Local And Universal.

The Old Knowledge Had Been Difficult But Not Distressing. It Had Been All Paradox And Myth, And It Had Made Sense. The New Knowledge Was All Fact And Reason, And It Made No Sense.

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.

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.

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.

If Eternity Had A Season, It Would Be Midsummer. Autumn, Winter, Spring Are All Change And Passage, But At The Height Of Summer The Year Stands Poised. It's Only A Passing Moment, But Even As It Passes The Heart Knows It Cannot Change.

Compare The Torrent And The Glacier. Both Get Where They Are Going.

To Read And To Write. Some Writers Have To Be Told To Write. They Think Their Job Is To Meet Agents And Have Experiences And They Can Just Be Rich And Famous. Their Job Is To Write. Some Really Don't Realize That. And You Can't Write Unless You Read.

One Man May As Easily Destroy, As Govern: Be King Or Anti-king.

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.

A Man Who Saw A Miracle Would Reject His Eyes' Witness, If Those With Him Saw Nothing.

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.

To Me The Female Principle Is, Or At Least Historically Has Been, Basically Anarchic. It Values Order Without Constraint, Rule By Custom Not By Force. It Has Been The Male Who Enforces Order, Who Constructs Power Structures, Who Makes, Enforces, And Breaks Laws.

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.

The Greatest Religious Problem Today Is How To Be Both A Mystic And A Militant; In Other Words How To Combine The Search For An Expansion Of Inner Awareness With Effective Social Action, And How To Feel One's True Identity In Both.

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

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

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

When He Found That The Administrators Were Upset, He Laughed. “do They Expect Students Not To Be Anarchists?” He Said. “what Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up

Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners. I'm Going To Go Fulfill My Proper Function In The Social Organism. I'm Going To Unbuild Walls.

Who Knows A Man's Name, Holds That Man's Life In His Keeping. Thus To Ged, Who Had Lost Faith In Himself, Vetch Had Given Him That Gift That Only A Friend Can Give, The Proof Of Unshaken, Unshakeable Trust.

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.

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.

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

We Are Volcanoes. When We Women Offer Our Experience As Our Truth, As Human Truth, All The Maps Change. There Are New Mountains.

You Fear Them Because You Fear Death, And Rightly: For Death Is Terrible And Must Be Feared,' The Mage Said...'and Life Is Also A Terrible Thing,' Ged Said, 'and Must Be Feared And Praised.

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.

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.

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.

Where Does Your Soul Go, When You Die In Hell?

A Wrong That Cannot Be Repaired Must Be Transcended.

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.

There Is No Kingdom Like The Forests.

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.

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.

I Write With All My Heart

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.

To Claim Power Over What You Do Not Understand Is Not Wise, Nor Is The End Of It Likely To Be Good.

Nobody Who Says, ‘i Told You So’ Has Ever Been, Or Will Ever Be, A Hero.

To Make A Thief, Make An Owner; To Create Crime, Create Laws.

If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself - As Men Have Done To Women, And Class Has Done To Class, And Nation Has Done To Nation - You May Hate It Or Deify It; But In Either Case You Have Denied Its Spiritual Equality And Its Human Reality. You Have Made It Into A Thing, To Which The Only Possible Relationship Is A Power Relationship. And Thus You Have Fatally Impoverished Your Own Reality.

As A Writer, You Are Free.

The One Thing A Writer Has To Have Is A Pencil And Some Paper. That's Enough, So Long As She Knows That She And She Alone Is In Charge Of That Pencil, And Responsible, She And She Alone, For What It Writes On That Paper.

Reason Is A Faculty Far Larger Than Mere Objective Force. When Either The Political Or The Scientific Discourse Announces Itself As The Voice Of Reason, It Is Playing God, And Should Be Spanked And Stood In The Corner.

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.

If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

A Man Who Doesn't Detest A Bad Government Is A Fool. And If There Were Such A Thing As A Good Government On Earth, It Would Be A Great Joy To Serve It.

Happiness Is Based On A Just Discrimination Of What Is Necessary, What Is Neither Necessary Nor Destructive, And What Is Destructive. In The Middle Category, However - That Of The Unnecessary But Undestructive, That Of Comfort, Luxury, Exuberance, Etc

Now Perhaps An Excessive Dread Of Overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects Not An Outward Reality, But An Inward State Of Mind. If You Feel Overcrowded When You're Not, What Does That Mean? Maybe That You're Afraid Of Human Contact--of Being Close To People, Of Being Touched.

Manhood Is Patience. Mastery Is Nine Time Patience

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

There Are Dance Artists, Painting Artists And Writing Artists. Authors Are Writing Artists. You Can Practice Art In Whatever Medium You Choose, And Words Are Mine.

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.

The Historic Function Of A Senator From Oregon Is To Drive All The Other Senators Mad.

Literacy Is So You Can Read The Operating Instructions.

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

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.

The Literature Of The Emperor Penguin Is As Forbidding, As Inaccessible, As The Frozen Heart Of Antarctica Itself. Its Beauties May Be Unearthly, But They Are Not For Us.

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 Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War. Of These Two Things, You Have Either One, Or The Other. Not Both.

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!

What Is A Body That Casts No Shadow? Nothing, A Formlessness, Two-dimensional, A Comic-strip Character. If I Deny My Own Profound Relationship With Evil I Deny My Own Reality. I Cannot Do, Or Make; I Can Only Undo, Unmake.

The Story Is Not In The Plot But In The Telling.

It Is Yin And Yang. Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness ... How Did It Go? Light, Dark. Fear, Courage. Cold, Warmth. Female, Male. It Is Yourself ... Both And One. A Shadow On Snow.

Living, Being In The World, Was A Much Greater And Stranger Thing Than She Had Ever Dreamed.

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

Capitalism’s Grow-or-die Imperative Stands Radically At Odds With Ecology’s Imperative Of Interdependence And Limit. The Two Imperatives Can No Longer Coexist With Each Other; Nor Can Any Society Founded On The Myth That They Can Be Reconciled Hope To Survive. Either We Will Establish An Ecological Society Or Society Will Go Under For Everyone, Irrespective Of His Or Her Status.

Sometimes I Not Only Stand There And Take It, I Even Smile At Them And Say I'm Sorry. When I Feel That Smile Coming Onto My Face, I Wish I Could Take My Face Off And Stamp On It.

The Sunlights Differ, But There Is Only One Darkness.

Fantasy Is Not Antirational, But Pararational; Not Realistic But Surrealistic, A Heightening Of Reality. In Freud's Terminology, It Employs Primary Not Secondary Process Thinking. It Employs Archetypes Which, As Jung Warned Us, Are Dangerous Things. Fantasy Is Nearer To Poetry, To Mysticism, And To Insanity Than Naturalistic Fiction Is. It Is A Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.

Dreams Take Short Cuts.

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.

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.

I'm Not A Quester Or A Searcher For The Truth. I Don't Really Think There Is One Answer, So I Never Went Looking For It. My Impulse Is Less Questing And More Playful. I Like Trying On Ideas And Ways Of Life And Religious Approaches. I'm Just Not A Good Candidate For Conversion.

It Is Only When Science Asks Why, Instead Of Simply Describing How, That It Becomes More Than Technology. When It Asks Why, It Discovers Relativity. When It Only Shows How, It Invents The Atom Bomb, And Then Puts Its Hands Over Its Eye And Says, My God What Have I Done?

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

Fantasy Is Probably The Oldest Literary Device For Talking About Reality.

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.

When You Work In Form, Be It A Sonnet Or Villanelle Or Whatever, The Form Is There And You Have To Fill It. And You Have To Find How To Make That Form Say What You Want To Say. But What You Find, Always--i Think Any Poet Who's Worked In Form Will Agree With Me--is That The Form Leads You To What You Want To Say.

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.

I Don't Want To Be A Propagandist, No Matter How Good The Cause. I Want To Tell Stories. It's Just That The Stories Have To Square With My Consciousness As A Woman And My Conscience As A Human Being.

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

We Have Been Civilized For A Thousand Millennia. We Have Histories Of Hundreds Of Those Millennia. We Have Tried Everything. Anarchism, In All Its Forms, With The Rest. But I Have Not Tried It. They Say There Is Nothing New Under Any Sun. But If Each Life Is Not New, Each Single Life, Then Why Are We Born?

Abstractions About Right And Wrong, Whether They Are As Old As Thou Shalt Not Kill Or As Modern As Do Your Own Thing, Often Serve Only To Confuse And Weaken Genuine Moral Decision.

If They Come Prying They Can Leave Curious.

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.

Civilized Man Says: I Am Self, I Am Master, All The Rest Is Other--outside, Below, Underneath, Subservient. I Own, I Use, I Explore, I Exploit, I Control. What I Do Is What Matters. What I Want Is What Matter Is For. I Am That I Am, And The Rest Is Women & Wilderness, To Be Used As I See Fit.

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

Suffering Is Dysfunctional, Except As A Bodily Warning Against Danger. Psychologically And Socially It's Merely Destructive.

In Reading A Novel, Any Novel, We Have To Know Perfectly Well That The Whole Thing Is Nonsense, And Then, While Reading, Believe Every Word Of It. Finally, 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 Changed A Little... But It's Very Hard To Say Just What We Learned, How We Were Changed.

The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.

What You Select From, In Order To Tell Your Story, Is Nothing Less Than Everything. What You Build Up Your World From, Your Local, Intelligible Rational, Coherent World, Is Nothing Less Than Everything. . . . . All Human Knowledge Is Local. Every Life, Each Human Life Is Local, Is Arbitrary, The Infinitesimal Momentary Glitter Of A Reflection.

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.

She'll Die.' 'aye. That's A Consequence Of Being Alive.

You Can Go Home Again...so Long As You Understand That Home Is A Place Where You Have Never Been.

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

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.

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

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

The Creative Adult Is The Child Who Has Survived.

Even In The Obscure Vast History Of A Planet The Time It Takes To Make A Forest Counts. It Takes A While. And Not Every Planet Can Do It; It Is No Common Effect, That Tangling Of The Sun's First Cool Light In The Shadow And Complexity Of Innumberable Wind-stirred Branches.

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.

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!

The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.

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

The Wise Needn't Ask, The Fool Asks In Vain.

You Cannot Buy The Revolution. You Cannot Make The Revolution. You Can Only Be The Revolution. It Is In Your Spirit, Or It Is Nowhere.

Children Know Perfectly Well That Unicorns Aren’t Real, But They Also Know That Books About Unicorns, If They Are Good Books, Are True Books.

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.

I Do Try To Separate My Personal Activism - Showing Up At A Demonstration Or Something - From What I Write.

I Hope You Are Never Victims, But I Hope You Have No Power Over Other People.

Power Over Others

Writers Have To Get Used To Launching Something Beautiful And Watching It Crash And Burn. They Also Have To Learn When To Let Go Control, When The Work Takes Off On Its Own And Flies, Farther Than They Ever Planned Or Imagined, To Places They Didn't Know They Knew.

There's Nothing Wrong With Me...except Acute Chronic Fear.

It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.

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

Predictions Are Uttered By Prophets (free Of Charge); By Clairvoyants (who Usually Charge A Fee, And Are Therefore More Honored In Their Day Than Prophets); And By Futurologists (salaried). Prediction Is The Business Of Prophets, Clairvoyants, And Futurologists. It Is Not The Business Of Novelists. A Novelist's Business Is Lying.

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.

I Always Wondered Why The Makers Leave Housekeeping And Cooking Out Of Their Tales. Isn't It What All The Great Wars And Battles Are Fought For -- So That At Day's End A Family May Eat Together In A Peaceful House?

All Knowledge Is Partial, Infinitesimally Partial. Reason Is A Net Thrown Out Into An Ocean. What Truth It Brings In Is A Fragment, A Glimpse, A Scintillation Of The Whole Truth.

The Place They Go Towards Is A Place Even Less Imaginable To Us Than The City Of Happiness. I Cannot Describe It At All. It Is Possible It Does Not Exist. But They Seem To Know Where They Are Going, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

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

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.

What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing.

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.

Planets Were Very Large Places, On Any Scale But That Of The Spaces In Between Them.

I Know People, I Know Towns, Farms, Hills And Rivers And Rocks, I Know How The Sun At Sunset In Autumn Falls On The Side Of A Certain Plowland In The Hills; But What Is The Sense Of Giving A Boundary To All That, Of Giving A Name And Ceasing To Love Where The Name Ceases To Apply?

He Knew Now, And The Knowledge Was Hard, That His Task Had Never Been To Undo What He Had Done, But To Finish What He Had Begun.

There Are Things That Outweigh Comfort, Unless One Is An Old Woman Or A Cat.

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.

For We Each Of Us Deserve Everything, Every Luxury That Was Ever Piled In The Tombs Of The Dead Kings, And We Each Of Us Deserve Nothing, Not A Mouthful Of Bread In Hunger. Have We Not Eaten While Another Starved? Will You Punish Us For That? Will You Reward Us For The Virtue Of Starving While Others Ate? No Man Earns Punishment, No Man Earns Reward. Free Your Mind Of The Idea Of Deserving, The Idea Of Earning, And You Will Begin To Be Able To Think.

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 Believe That All The Best Faculties Of A Mature Human Being Exist In The Child. . . That One Of The Most Deeply Human, And Humane, Of These Faculties Is The Power Of Imagination.

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.

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

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

The Preservation Of Life Seems To Be Rather A Slogan Than A Genuine Goal Of The Anti-abortion Forces; What They Want Is Control. Control Over Behavior: Power Over Women. Women In The Anti-choice Movement Want To Share In Male Power Over Women, And Do So By Denying Their Own Womanhood, Their Own Rights And Responsibilities.

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.

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

Changing Your Life

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

The Desire For Power Feeds Off Itself, Growing As It Devours.

Desire For Power

Primitiveness And Civilization Are Degrees Of The Same Thing. If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War.

No, I Don't Mean Love, When I Say Patriotism. I Mean Fear. The Fear Of The Other. And Its Expressions Are Political, Not Poetical: Hate, Rivalry, Aggression.

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

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words.

You Sit Down And You Do It, And You Do It, And You Do It, Until You Have Learned To Do It.

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

Art And Entertainment Are The Same Thing, In That The More Deeply And Genuinely Entertaining A Work Is, The Better Art It Is. To Imply That Art Is Something Heavy And Solemn And Dull, And Entertainment Is Modest But Jolly And Popular, Is Neo-victorian Idiocy At Its Worst.

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

Progress Means Nothing To Presence.

The End Justifies The Means. But What If There Never Is An End? All We Have Is Means.

If One Believes That Words Are Acts, As I Do, Then One Must Hold Writers Responsible For What Their Words Do.

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Kathie Lee Gifford

Solange Knowles

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