Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

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.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.

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.

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

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

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

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.