Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Octavia E. Butler
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Octavia E. Butler.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
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.
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.
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.
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
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.
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.
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, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
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.
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.
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
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.
I'm very happy alone.
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?
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.
Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.
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.
How dull it is to have people defining you.
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.
My characters hope for better lives.
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.
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
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.
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.
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.
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.
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big talent is persistence.
Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
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 used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
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.
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.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
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?'
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
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.
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.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
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.
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
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