Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.