Insights

Some people hear questions as disinclinations. You say, “Why are we going?” They hear, “I don’t want to go.”

Maybe they grew up around people who are indirect, and use questions to communicate cancellation. But questioning is necessary for exploring ideas.

I distinctly remember at Microsoft in the late 90s, walking around campus and there was just all the folks sort of saying, God, we must be God's gifts to mankind because we are so good now that the market also recognizes it, except that it was obviously the beginning of the end in some sense, right? The day hubris takes over and you're not grounded... See more

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious... See more

Like human happiness, teenage happiness does not flourish when everyone has the freedom to live just as they please. Where there is neither order nor necessity in life—no constraints, no inhibitions, no discomfort—life becomes both relaxing and boring, as American philosopher Allan Bloom notes. A soft imprisonment.

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

INTERVIEWER

Against whom were you measuring your work?

LE GUIN

Writers I’d have liked to be as good as, although not like ?

INTERVIEWER

Right.

LE GUIN

Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. And then, when I finally learned to read her, Virginia Woolf. Shoot for the top, always. You know you’ll never make it, but what’s the fun if you don’t shoot for the top?

“You can either be judged because you created something or ignored because you left your greatness inside of you.”