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.

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

To use the enemy’s weapon is to play the enemy’s game…speak the truth and hear the truth.

Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {…} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet...

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction —...

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can’t. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets...

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,...

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature...

I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the...

Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a...

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.

But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.

Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, “the love of nature” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has...

Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

… privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in...

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of...

Where does your soul go when you die in Hell?

o. 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...

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

You don’t speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things....

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I...

Was he leaving home, or going home?

There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.