“Fact is one of our finest fictions.”

“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apartfrom older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn fromcertain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences,and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them.Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, analternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is ametaphor.A metaphor for what?If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all thesewords, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and usedup my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly,that the truth is a matter of the imagination.”

“I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.""Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned."In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin.”

“This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story. ”

“The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”

“I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.”