The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I...

Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so...

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.

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a...

There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other,...

Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.

You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,’ the mage said…’And life is also a terrible thing,’ Ged said, ‘and must be feared and praised.

Without war there are no heroes.””What harm would that be?””Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.

You have nothing. You posses nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad...

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of...

…All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in...

For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I...

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but...

Sure, it’s simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me...

Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the...

Fish and visitors stink after three days.

a book is a box of words until you open it.

. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what...

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have...

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence;...

The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were...

Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may...

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to...

To see a candle’s light one must take it into a dark place.

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of...

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair…Consider, Arren. To refuse...

We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not...

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war.” She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she...

I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return.””Nothing? You call your theory nothing””Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit,” he said, turning to...

If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate...

Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by...

… there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who knew the Archmage’s name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the Silent, the wizard of...

It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet,...

…[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it...

They are of the dream time. I don’t understand it, I can’t say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the...

It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.