Ursula K. Le Guin

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.

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

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

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.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy?