A Quote by Octavia E. Butler
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.
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The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.
My history of moving away from drugs is not the kind you hear from most people. Certainly not from celebrities, especially those professionally recovering people. What I've noticed in my overuse of cocaine is the period of pleasure versus the period of pain. That is to say that when you first get high on anything, the pleasure is predominant and you don't pay much price. A little hangover or whatever it might be with another drug. But after a while the ratio begins to change, and there' s far more pain in the deal than pleasure. It just completely goes in another direction.
I don't feel tentative when I start to write. I've usually thought about a novel or novella for several years and created a lot of juice and density and energy by that time so by the time I get ready to go, I just let 'er fling, you know.
In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.
Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.
Besides that, I felt guilty. I thought for some reason... I was alive, and Buddy and those boys were dead, and I didn't know how, but somehow I'd caused it.
At some point, I talked about how I had never graduated college. I dropped out my sophomore year to start MercyMe 21 years ago. Part of the reason was I felt like I was treading water.
I had thought up the title, 'The Good Luck of Right Now,' several years ago. I had no idea what it meant or what the book would be about but I thought, 'Someday I'm going to write a book with that title.'
Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago. "The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel. A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of another novel written by the same author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no state. There was no nation. All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.
There is also somehow the idea that this gay thing is all just about indulgence in carnal pleasure. When I was twenty and felt that nobody could know I was gay, I was having sex with strangers in public parks. I don't think it was evil exactly, but it wasn't so great either. There was nobody particularly benefiting from it, except, I suppose, to the extent that it gave some pleasure to me and perhaps whomever I was with.
The idea of the duets albums was the people who joined Frank Sinatra in each song were themselves successful record artists, I never was. I felt a certain apprehension at the time that some people thought my being there was pure nepotism. I felt kind of out of place about that.
...you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upward and, just when you thought you'd reach your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her.
The pain caused by this wound which He inflicts on me and the sweetness which accompanies it are so intense that I cannot even begin to describe it. However. . . this pain and this
sweetness are completely spiritual, although it is also true that they are shared by the body to a high degree.
I've never been able to develop a movie over several years, and keep coming back to it and adding to it. I get excited by the spark of an idea, and if I can't go make that, there's another idea that comes along that I get excited about. It has to happen quickly, in order for it to happen, at all.
Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift.
Maui is a beautiful island. It's really the site of an ancient civilization that we've forgotten about, a civilization that existed millions of years ago. When their time came, they left this world and another race was born, the race of human beings.
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