Ursula K. Le Guin and the fantasy

Ursula K. Le Guin on fantasy “The ‘secondary creation’ as Tolkien called it, must be entire and self-consistent. Imaginative authority and inner coherence are fantasy’s chief means of obtaining its end, which is the reader’s willing participation in an undisguised invention. Fantasy is shamelessly fictive“ (Plausibility Revisited)

Ursula K. Le Guin on C.S Lewis’s fantasy ”I believe that as soon as wishful thinking or a conscious political or didactic purpose intrude on that credence, deform it ande the story loses its plausibility. Wishful thinking gives us the feeble kind of fantasy where everything is easy and you never have to feed or water or look after the horse you rode all day. An ideological purpose produces a sermon, or satire (which is not fantasy and has very different standards of plausibility since it is a mirror held up to actual life)” (Plausibility in fantasy)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s note to young writers ”A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper” (Ursula K. Le Guin’s website)