He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than t… - Ursula K. Le Guin

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now — and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.

She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!