"If you say story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you're limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is a part of life, I'm not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it's not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things."

From Ursula K. Le Guin, Conversations on Writing, Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon, Tin House Books, 2017

"People always talk about the border as that fence between people there in those towns. That's not the border. It's something else, something underscoring the difference between danger and grace, which is not something that separates people. It's something that joins them, as they face the same border."

From Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, Alberto Álvaro Ríos

"In fact all the characters are the author if you come right down to the honest truth of it. So the author has the perfect right to know what they're thinking. If the author doesn't tell you what they are thinking...why? This is worth thinking about. Often it's simply to spin out suspense by not telling you what the author knows. Well, that's legitimate. This is art. But I'm trying to get people to think about their choices here, because there are so many beautiful choices that are going unused. In a way, first person and limited third are the easiest ones, the least interesting."

From Ursula K. Le Guin, Conversations on Writing, Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon, Tin House Books, 2017

"It's here where I suggest people read books like Woolf's To The Lighthouse to see what she does by moving from mind to mind. Or Tolstoy's War and Peace for goodness' sake. Wow. The way he slides from one point of view to another without you knowing that you've changed point of view – he does it so gracefully. You know where you are, whose eyes you are seeing through, but you don't have the sense of being jerked from place to place. That's mastery of a craft."

From Ursula K. Le Guin, Conversations on Writing, Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon, Tin House Books, 2017

"To assume that the present tense is literally 'now' and the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve."

From Ursula K. Le Guin, Conversations on Writing, Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon, Tin House Books, 2017