Latest Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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 K. Le Guin

  Writing, Ambition, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 K. Le Guin

  Book, Mean, Careers

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 K. Le Guin

  Thinking, Way, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mean, Marketing, Exclusion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Artist, Thinking, Arrogance

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  War, Home, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Choices, Privileged

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Country, Growing Up, War

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I gather that a lot of the "pots" in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Museums, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com