An unexpected place for a Le Guin interview, but it's great nontheless.

"I’m not saying that a book that makes you cry is a great book. It would be a wonderful criterion if only it worked, but alas it admits effective sentimentality, the knee-jerk/heart-string stimulus. For instance, a lot of us cry when reading of the death of an animal in a story — which in itself is interesting and significant, as if we give ourselves permission to weep the lesser tears — but that is something else and less. A book that makes me cry the way music can or tragedy can – deep tears, the tears that come of accepting as my own the grief there is in the world — must have something of greatness about it."

"I keep reading books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally." Ursula LeGuin on obscenity, swearing, and the way it's used on contemporary media. (LeGuin is someone who, for reference, has always used language precisely and carefully; she is not a prude, just bored of a lack of imagination.)

"Why did we look up for blessing - instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon." Ursula Le Guin's 1983 commencement address at Mills College.

This story is copyright 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is transcribed from Le Guin's collection The Compass Rose because I'd like my friends to read it.

"To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary." Ursula le Guin on fine form in the NS.