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The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Book by Ursula K. Le Guin · 17 quotes · People, World, Writing

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The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination Quotes

“Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.”

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Book:The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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“Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.”

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Book:The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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“If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.”

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“Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.”

PeopleWorldWritingHardAgeLyingHumanityNextAsksSexRaceOpinionAliveDoorsGroupsUniversalSafetyBraveGenderImmenseOutsidersValidityAffiliationCateringPersonal Opinions
Book:The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

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“Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.”

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Book:The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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“Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.”

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Book:The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
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