Words matter. These are the best Octavia E. Butler Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write – every day, no excuses. It’s so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they’d rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
The major tragedies in life, there’s just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It’s my way of dealing, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.
A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating. It’s so easy as a young writer to think you’re been very clear when in fact you haven’t.
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything.
My characters hope for better lives.
Science fiction is not formulaic.
With a disaster like global warming, it’s too late to worry about when it’s looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
The big talent is persistence.
No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we’ll do what we’ve always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.
How dull it is to have people defining you.
I have a huge and savage conscience that won’t let me get away with things.
As a black and as a woman, I didn’t think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.
Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn’t had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.
I’m comfortably asocial – a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.
At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it.
In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.
Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn’t exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we’re as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it’s because you’re telling a story about racism or at least about race.
Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other ‘isms’ that cause so much suffering in the world.
My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
Too many writers get into that gross-’em-out factor.
Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you’re hurt, you’re really on your own. You’re alone, and there’s no one to help you.
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
Most of us, if we’re not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.
I don’t know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it’s in the movies doesn’t mean magazines are buying it.
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you’ve set. But if you’re writing about science, you have to first learn what you’re writing about.
