Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Quotations

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

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

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.