I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fea… - Ursula K. Le Guin

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I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

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About Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (21 October 1929 – 22 January 2018) was an American writer, known mostly for her work in science fiction and fantasy. She received the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, and was made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction in 2003.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Ursula Kroeber
Alternative Names: Ursula Kroeber Le Guin Ursula Le Guin
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Additional quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

I have written so often of how and why it took me so long to write the six books of Earthsea that the story has become like the book you have to read to your four-year-old every night for weeks—You really want to hear it again? Oh well, okay, here goes! I wrote the first three books in five years: ’68, ’70, ’72. I was on a roll. None of them was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led. I started confidently on the fourth book. The central character was Tenar again, of course, to balance it out. I knew she hadn’t stayed and studied wizardry with Ogion, but had married a farmer and had children, and that the story was going to bring her and Ged back together. But by the middle of the first chapter, I realized that I didn’t know who she was—now. I didn’t know why she’d done what she’d done or what she had to do. I didn’t know her story, or Ged’s. I couldn’t plot or plan it. I couldn’t write it. It took me eighteen years to learn how.

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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.

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