Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

Conrad’s “struggle” and Jo March/Lu Alcott’s “vortex” are descriptions of the same kind of all-out artistic work; and in both cases the artist is looked after by the family. But I feel an important difference in their perceptions. Where Alcott receives a gift, Conrad asserts a right; where she is taken into the vortex, the creative whirlwind, becom

Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent – to tell us a story.

The minds of animals are a great, sacred, present mystery. I do think animals have languages, but they are entirely truthful languages. It seems that we are the only animals who can lie. We can think and say what is not so and never was so, or what has never been, yet might be. We can invent; we can suppose; we can imagine. All that gets mixed in w

they had. The instructor directs their practice. Practice is an interesting word. We think of practicing as beginner’s stuff, playing scales, basic exercises. But the practice of an art is the doing of that art – it is the art.

for example am Ursula; Miss Ursula Kroeber; Mrs. then Ms. Le Guin; Ursula K. Le Guin; this latter is “the writer,” but who were, who are, the others? She is the writer

And this is a real issue, I think: the question of “the unspeakable.” If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

read. To provide the best: everyone agrees on that (even the people who vote against school levies). But we don’t and we can’t agree on what books are the best. And therefore what is vital is that we provide variety, abundance, plenty – not books that reflect one body of opinion or doctrine, not books that one group or sect thinks good, but the bro

That great vision is the end as seen by science: entropy, the cold, dark chaos that is the target of Time’s arrow.

The most it says is, I think, something like this: If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in self-esteem, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows; I only know we wo