Ursula Le Guin Quotes on Writing: The Complete Collection

ursula le guin quotes on writing
by CJ McDaniel // June 15  

Science fiction and fantasy-focused literature often fall under the “despised, marginal” genre that most readers and writers neglect. As for Ursula Le Guin, these genres became her strong points as a writer. Throughout her career, she has established herself as one of the most influential figures in the literary world—an iconic writer, not just a science fiction author. Moreover, her works displayed her willingness to take risks and push boundaries of what we define as “genres.” These, including other aspects of her personality and writing, strengthened her name in the literary world. Furthermore, many people seek Ursula Le Guin’s quotes for knowledge and guidance in writing.

Born and raised in Berkeley, California, on October 21, 1929, Ursula Le Guin lived her early years in an intellectually stimulating environment. Her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, was a distinguished anthropologist. Meanwhile, her mother, Theodora Kroeber Quinn, was also a writer known for her famous work about the life of the last Yahi tribe member, Ishi. Both parents seemingly influenced her career as she grew up in an academic household encouraging exploration of art, ideas, and culture. Hence, Le Guin developed her interest in poetry, mythology, and biology at a young age.

Le Guin’s full-time writing career began in the late 1950s. She faced a rough start since mainstream publishers initially rejected her. However, she found acceptance in venturing into science fiction and fantasy. Soon enough, she became one of the most significant writers in the genre, with her “Earthsea” novels earning awards while selling millions of copies worldwide. Moreover, Ursula Le Guin’s quotes on writing and other categories are an incredible source of inspiration for writers and readers, as she spoke eloquently about her craft.

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Writing

Ursula Le Guin struggled to break into the mainstream fiction world at first. However, things changed when she ventured into the fantasy and science-fiction genres—categories often dismissed by critics. Her first three novels, Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions, cemented her place in the genre, giving her a wider audience. Moreover, her ability to explore universal themes while weaving fantasy elements into her gentle, often impartial prose won her numerous honors and recognition. She won the title of Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, becoming the second woman to do so, and earned the Living Legend medal from the Library of Congress. She also won six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, SFWA’s Grand Master, and many more.

These achievements prove why she’s one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Hence, if you need some quotes to help your writing, enjoy this collection of Ursula Le Guin quotes to your content!

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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

– Ursula Le Guin

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

– Ursula Le Guin

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

– Ursula Le Guin

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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

– Ursula 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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

Sure, it’s simple, writing for kids… Just as simple as bringing them up.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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

– Ursula Le Guin

When I’m writing I don’t dream much; it’s like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

– Ursula Le Guin

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

– Ursula Le Guin

I write with all my heart.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

I do try to separate my personal activism – showing up at a demonstration or something – from what I write.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

The great authors share their souls with us- “literally.

– Ursula Le Guin

No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten, she gets dropped from the lists, the courses, the anthologies, while the men get kept. … If she had the nerve to have children, her chances of getting dropped are higher still. … So 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 Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Writers

Poetry and short fiction were Le Guin’s earliest literary works. However, she discovered that science-fiction and fantasy suited her creativity and curiosity, so most of her writings fall under these genres. Further in her career, she sought artistic freedom by writing creative nonfiction, essays on feminism and writing, translation, children’s books, and more. Apart from writing across many genres, Le Guin also tapped various audiences. For example, although her Earthsea series targeted children, she skillfully managed to attract a large adult readership. The themes she used for her novels were also something to bear in mind as she tackled relevant topics such as gender roles and oppression in all of their forms.

Ursula Le Guin did not hesitate to explore genres, audiences, and themes in her writings, making her an inspiration for writers of all sorts. Indeed, there’s much more to learn from Ursula Le Guin’s quotes and writing directed at writers like herself.

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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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

– Ursula Le Guin

A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

If you’re a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don’t censor, don’t control. Listen, and write.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Art

Writing falls under one of the many art forms as it requires creative thinking. Ursula Le Guin undeniably mastered the art of writing, considering how she articulated her thoughts and imagination through words. She had an incredible insight into the craft, using her creativity to deliver written masterpieces. With that in mind, here are quotes from Ursula Le Guin that discusses art and the art of writing.

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 Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

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 Le Guin

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.

– Ursula Le Guin

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

– Ursula Le Guin

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

– Ursula Le Guin

In art, ‘good enough’ is not good enough.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it’s visible? That is a real question.

– Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Books

Le Guin’s family possessed a collection of books that was enough to keep the members immersed in reading whenever they had the time. Hence, she grew fond of science fiction, fantasy, and mythology books in her early years. It’s safe to say that books also influenced the career and genre she chose. Therefore, one can expect knowledge about books from Ursula Le Guin, whether taken from her writing or quotes.

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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 Le Guin

By and large books are mankind’s best invention.

– Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Literature

Ursula Le Guin continues to reign as one of the most influential voices in contemporary American literature. Her body of work featured her courageous exploration of universal themes and unique literary approach while incorporating fantasy and futuristic elements. She established a name for herself by writing in genres dominated by men, helping other writers like her to gain confidence in writing what suits them best.

To honor Ursula Le Guin and her incredible contribution to literature, here are her quotes about literature taken from her spoken words or writings.

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

– Ursula Le Guin

… the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

– Ursula Le Guin

I think what’s happening is, it’s all – fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever – finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Science Fiction

Most science fiction readers recognize Le Guin’s name, even if they haven’t read her work. It’s understandable why seeing how she’s considered an award-winning literary titan in writing science fiction and fantasy novels. She made great use of her imagination, inviting readers to travel to the fantastic worlds she crafted.

Learn about writing science fiction from the sci-fi master herself through these Ursula Le Guin quotes!

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

– Ursula Le Guin

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

– Ursula Le Guin

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Science fiction – and the correct shortcut is ‘sf’ – uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it’s doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.

– Ursula Le Guin

I think what’s happening is, it’s all – fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever – finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

– Ursula Le Guin

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit – subliterature.

– Ursula Le Guin

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

– Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin Quotes About Reading

Le Guin’s youth was intellectually and artistically rich, thanks to the academic environment her parents had for the family. Their vast book collection exposed the children to reading when they were young, influencing Le Guin and her writing later on. Among the things they love to read were the issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding Science Fiction.

Apart from her words on writing, you may want to check out these quotes if you’re curious to see Ursula Le Guin’s thoughts about reading!

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 Le Guin

Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.

– Ursula Le Guin

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.

– Ursula Le Guin

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.

– Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin’s body of work, writing style, and quotes on writing earned her awards and loyal fans of all ages. Over her 60-year career, she penned 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories and novellas, 13 children’s books, 11 volumes of poetry, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Not many writers can do such high-quality work in many forms, further proving Le Guin’s excellence in her craft. She’s a true master of science fiction and fantasy, deserving of the recognition she received.

Need more motivation to overcome your struggles in writing than these quotes from Ursula Le Guin? Check out our collection of quotes on writing from other authors here.

About the Author

CJ grew up admiring books. His family owned a small bookstore throughout his early childhood, and he would spend weekends flipping through book after book, always sure to read the ones that looked the most interesting. Not much has changed since then, except now some of those interesting books he picks off the shelf were designed by his company!