A Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote Topics

Beasts Brain Charge College Come Course Courses Creative Creative Writing Did Does Down Down And Empty English Every Full Given Good Hiding How Impression Just Kids Like Little Lot Many Mean Melville Multiply Myth Out Page Place Pomposity Scared See Significance Sit Swarms Symbol Them Tremendous Underlying Unless Words Write Writing

Quote Author

Ursula K. Le Guin
American - Novelist
October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018

I had no idea when I went to college what I'd be doing. I took organic chemistry and did terribly, but I was good in English and art. I took many courses and participated in as many activities as I could. I learned a lot about every single thing.

Martha Stewart

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

Jennifer Weiner

We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something.

Anant Agarwal

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

David Christian

The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.

Alan Garner

I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.

Walter Jon Williams

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.

Kate Atkinson

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.

David Almond

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

Charles Lamb

The issues involved are sufficiently important that courses are now moving out of the philosophy departments and into mainstream computer science. And they affect everyone. Many of the students attracted to these courses are not technology majors, and many of the topics we discuss relate to ethical challenges that transcend the computer world.

D. Michael Quinn

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

Karen Joy Fowler

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

Samuel E. Morison

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

James M. Cain

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

Arthur Miller

I look in the mirror and I don't see a sex symbol. I just see a guy who looks like he's been beaten with a baseball bat. I mean, is this the face of a sex symbol? They say that because I work in the movies.

Javier Bardem

Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.

W. H. Auden

A Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors