Le Guin: Perception Compassion Hope

Today is the birthday of science fiction writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (books by this author), born in Berkeley, California, in 1929. Her father was the well-known anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and she grew up listening to Native American legends. She would later say, “My father studied real cultures and I make them up — in a way, it’s the same thing.” She’s best known for her Earthsea series of books about a world populated by wizards and dragons. It’s been translated into 16 languages. She also worked for 40 years on a translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.

An interviewer once asked her advice for writers, and she replied: “I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.”

She said, “It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.”
-Writer's Almanac