- Friendship
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- Nov 07, 2020
Octavia E Butler Quotes
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Get
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
- Problem
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- Nov 07, 2020
But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
- Reading
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- Nov 07, 2020
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
- Conscience
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
- Knew
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- Nov 07, 2020
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
- Early
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
- Doing
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- Nov 07, 2020
No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
- Hurt
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
- Open
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- Nov 07, 2020
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fun
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- Nov 07, 2020
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fine
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Every Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
- Humanity
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Hope
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
- Country
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Get
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- Nov 07, 2020
Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.
- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction is not formulaic.
- Nov 07, 2020
Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- How
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- Nov 07, 2020
How dull it is to have people defining you.
- Evil
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
- Nov 07, 2020
I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
- Character
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
- Kids
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- Nov 07, 2020
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
- Black
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Peace
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Handing
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- Nov 07, 2020
I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Characters
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- Nov 07, 2020
My characters hope for better lives.
- Happy
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm very happy alone.
- Naturally
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- Nov 07, 2020
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
- Grow
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
- Nov 07, 2020
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
- Mean
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
- Persistence
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- Nov 07, 2020
The big talent is persistence.
- Direction
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Eras
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Anything
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.
- Disaster
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Enemies
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.
- Eyes
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.
- Engineering
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- Nov 07, 2020
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.
- Pain
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- Nov 07, 2020