Ursula K. Le Guin

I don’t know if I believe in dragons, but I do believe in the people who believe in dragons.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons.

The creative adult is the child who survived.

I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because my first name ends in 'a,' and I own three bras and a pair of high-heeled shoes.

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.

I am not a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.

Wizards do not do magic, they do their jobs.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

The unread story is not a story; it is a sentence, a string of words, until it has been read. The reader is a collaborator.

I think that science fiction is a metaphor. What is metaphor? Metaphor is a way of saying one thing and meaning another.

If you don't like my books, don't read them. There's no law. But don't try to stop other people from reading them.

Hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken societies and their 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.

I am a man, no doubt. But I am also a woman. I am a white woman. I am a white woman who lives in a white society. I am a white woman who is a feminist. I am a white woman who is a mother. I am a white woman who is a writer. I am all of these things, and none of them.

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

The best thing to do with a bad book is to burn it.

We can't just be consumers, we have to be citizens.

I am not an optimist. I am a possibilist.