Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)

It’s a Gordian knot which I have no wish to cut. It’s obvious there’s going to be no future without the past and no past without the future. I get rather Chinese about the whole thing.

A city is where all dangers come together for human beings, where everything happens to human beings. I use “city” in a fairly metaphorical sense. A city is where culture comes together and flowers. A pueblo is a city.

Actually I’m terrible at plotting, so all I do is sort of put people in motion and they go around in a circle and they generally end up about where they started out. That’s a Le Guin plot.

He’s permanent—and science fiction publishers, particularly the paperbacks, aren’t used to thinking in terms of permanence. They think in terms of throwaways. And so that’s what’s got to be changed.

An awful lot of writing seems to be sitting and staring.

Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.

Two people can do three fulltime jobs—teaching, writing and family.

Again, it seems rather immodest, but science fiction and anthropology do have a good deal in common. As the cultural anthropologist must resist and be conscious of his own cultural limitations, and bigotries, and prejudices—he can’t get rid of them, but he must be conscious of them—I think a science fiction writer has a responsibility to do the sam

Anybody can hear a story, or read a myth, that hits something deep within them. The ones you remember are the ones that reflect something deep within yourself, which you probably can’t put into words, except maybe as a myth.