"A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never ...
Was he leaving home, or going home?
More Ursula K. Le Guin quotes
"Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do ...
"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.
"The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes present...
"Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.
"[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the ...
"I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing fr...
"The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
"To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.
"Fish and visitors stink after three days.
"I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ig...
"Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something mu...
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
"The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regar...
"To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.