Ursula K. Le Guin on the absurdity of denying your age: "If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub."
On cultural perceptions of fantasy: "The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"
On breakfast: "Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime."
Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula's blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: "How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us."
"The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them." -- Melissa Febos, New York Times Book Review
"Witty . . . deeply observed." -- USA Today
"A book that truly does matter." -- Houston Chronicle
"One of the most original imaginations ever to grace American letters...Through decades and scores of books, the genre Le Guin made her own has itself grown up -- writers from David Mitchell to Salman Rushdie have walked through the door Le Guin opened...To sit and talk with Le Guin is to engage a powerful mind that has responded to ideological entrapments or career bumps by carpentering a new space for itself. She is brisk and funny, but unsparing when asked to comment on something which, in her mind, does not measure up...She shows that stories that stand the test of time can come from something as simple as fellowship: like a family, like an extraordinary body of work, like a house built from a kit, standing proudly on a hill, more than a hundred years later." -- John Freeman, Boston Globe
"Le Guin, of course, has long been one of our most powerful writers of conscience." -- David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"It's hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin." -- Scott Timber, Salon
"She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is." -- Margaret Atwood
"Ursula K. Le Guin's prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory." -- Jonathan Lethem
"There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin's." -- Grace Paley
"Le Guin is a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller with the humor and force of a Twain. She creates stories for everyone from New Yorker literati to the hardest audience, children. She remakes every genre she uses." -- Sarah Smith, Boston Globe
"[Le Guin] is frequently referred to as 'the best of' for all manner of things--like best fantasy writer, best science fiction writer, best female writer--all of which is silly, as she both defies and accepts all categorization. Her influence on generations of readers and writers, from George R.R. Martin to Jennifer Egan to David Mitchell, is as evident as it is impossible to overstate. Admired for her quiet daring, her structures, and her inventions, most of all she is revered for her sentences." -- Choire Sicha, Interview Magazine
