paintedout:

"Like all artists, we science fiction writers are trying to make and use such a connection or bridge between the conscious and the unconscious –– so that our readers can make the journey, too. If the only tool we use is the intellect, we will produce only lifeless copies or parodies of the archetypes that live in our own deeper mind and in the great works of art and mythology. If we abandon intellect, we're likely to submerge our own personality and talent in a stew of mindless submyths [i.e. tropes], themselves coarse, feeble parodies of their archetypal origins. The only way to the truly collective, to the image that is alive and meaningful in all of us, seems to be through the truly personal. Not the impersonality of pure reason; not the impersonality of "the masses"; but the irreducibly personal –– the self. To reach the others, artists go into the self. Using reason, they deliberately enter the irrational. The farther they go into the self, the closer they come to the other." - Ursula K. Le Guin

"I keep on digging. I use the tools of feminism, and try to figure out what makes me work and how I work, so that I will no longer work in ignorance and irresponsibility." - Ursula K. Le Guin