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"Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying."
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"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."
"Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend."
"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."
"Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media."
"A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."
"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
"You can't burn down a made-up place."
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
"I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."
"In this he saw that Ogion had been right: the shadow could not draw on his power, so long as he was turned against it."
"What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. "A web we men weave." Ged answered."
"In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell."
"The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes."
"I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don't have to learn.Vokep shook his head grimly. "It's the kids, he said. "Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians. They won't let go. He sighed. "Touch and go, brother, that's the rule. Don't ever let yourself be owned."
"The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction."
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