I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.

There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.

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.