Ursula K. Le Guin
"Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | writing, reaching your audience, publishing, protect the art, value the art, Ursula K. Le Guin
"We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | art, writing, value the art, Ursula K. Le Guin
"To preach that story is conflict, always to ask 'where's the conflict in your story?'—this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, you're limiting your view of the world severely. And, in a sense, making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, Social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I'm not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it's not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | writing, storytelling, artists must EXPERIENCE, artist's message, Ursula K. Le Guin, creative freedom
"I hear what I write. I started writing poetry when I was really young. I always hear it in my head. I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don't seem to hear it, don't listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual. But if it's happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | creative process, language, music, writing, poetry, artists must EXPERIENCE, Ursula K. Le Guin
"That is something that I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it most wonderfully in a letter to her friend Vita. Style, she says, is rhythm—'the wave in the mind'—the wave, the rhythm, are there before the words, and bring the words to fit it."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | language, writing, artist's voice, Ursula K. Le Guin, Virginia Woolf
"Judgment by genre is just wrong—stupid, wasteful. Most people know that now."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | genre, Ursula K. Le Guin, categorization of art
"What young writers always talk about—'finding your voice'—well, you can't find your own voice if you aren't listening for it. The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it's doing. Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry. And so we get prose that goes 'clunk, clunk, clunk.' And we don't know what's wrong with it."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | writing, poetry, artist's voice, Ursula K. Le Guin
"Fake realism is the escapism of our time."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | reading, reaching your audience, Ursula K. Le Guin
"We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
for Creatives | art, writing, value the art, Ursula K. Le Guin