It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Le Guin distinguishes between moral instruction and storytelling, emphasizing her role as a novelist over that of a preacher.
In this quote, Ursula K. Le Guin articulates her belief that literature should not serve merely as a medium for moral preaching or didactic messages, but rather as a creative form that explores the complexities of human experience through fiction. By asserting that she writes novels instead of tracts, Le Guin highlights the importance of storytelling in illuminating truths about life and humanity, showcasing her perspective on the role of a writer as an artist rather than a moral authority.
Themes
WritingFictionNovelsStorytellingCreativityArt
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared at a literary festival to emphasize the importance of creative expression in literature.
More from Ursula K. Le Guin
All quotes βIn 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 find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. βDo they expect students not to be anarchists?β he said. βWhat else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Similar quotes
I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.
F. Scott FitzgeraldRead
For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.
Kehinde WileyRead
Being Doctor Who, I used to look at the clock and know at half past four we were going to stop rehearsing - and that was a sad moment for me because I wanted to stay in this beautiful, unreal world.
Tom BakerRead
The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.
Christopher McdougallRead
All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.
Ernest GainesRead