as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again.
Ursula K. Le GuinAnyhow theyโre always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le GuinWhile we read a novel, we are insaneโbonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Ursula K. Le GuinAs you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
Ursula K. Le GuinAt this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
Ursula K. Le GuinJungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. โAh, the Night Sea Voyage!โ we cry, feeling that we have understood something important โ but weโve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.
Ursula K. Le Guin