Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

Females get hired along procreative lines. After 40, we're kind of cooked.

If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men. It was more often done by men than by women, if we're going to be truthful.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Male athletes don't get dropped when they father kids.

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

I've actually been turned down for jobs because I was in Playboy.

Pulp paperbacks have always provided a training ground for men, Some of them went on to become respected authors - Dean Koontz, Nelson DeMille and Martin Cruz Smith, for example. Why couldn't a woman?

We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal; this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

The bottom line is that female writers aren't being given enough opportunities by male producers.

Not regarded as the equals of men.

In the present state of society, if every man who seduces a child of 15 leaving her no practical alternative but suicide or a life of prostitution, were promptly put out of existence, the morals of the community would be vastly improved. This girl has had no trial by a jury of her peers. She has been tried, convicted, and sentenced by men alone. If half the jury had been women as should be invariably the case,--if there had been but one woman connected with the trial, no such cruel sentence of capital punishment would have shocked the moral sense of mankind.

Polygamy is allowed among the Chinese, and a man is pleased with his favorite wife and with his Maker in proportion to the number of sons she bears him; no account is made of daughters.

Women with children are less likely to be hired and be paid well; men with children are more likely to be hired and be paid well.

People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it's as if books did die out.

There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.

There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.

I've never been discriminated against, but I have witnessed discrimination. I was talking to a director and asked why one of my friends didn't get a particular part, and he specifically told me it was because she just had a baby and it was hard to see her as sexy.

When I made 'A Few Small Repairs' and it did well, I followed that up with having a baby, and that was not received well at my record company. I was written off, and that had a bearing on my career.

More women than ever are having babies at the peak of their careers. When will we stop punishing them for it?

People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.

There will never be a job that I do in this industry where I don't have to talk about being a woman. I will always be a female artist. People will put that in front whether you like it or not.

I think, in all fields, there's this motherhood pay penalty where, the second you become a mother - and this is true whether you give birth or adopt - you're perceived to not be as committed to your job. Whereas men are perceived as breadwinners who now need more money and promotions because they're fathers.