A Quote by Octavia E. Butler

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'm always thinking about what a black lady would think about what I'm doing, just because I feel like they have such great taste, mostly because as black women, we've spent a lot of time downloading what a white male narrative is, so in my head, I'm like, 'If a black woman likes it, if she responds to it, then it's probably pretty damn great.'
I really feel all my adult life has been spent in that little black box. If a wonderful part on TV came along I would do it. But I don't want to do a recurring role. It would just be my luck that the thing would be successful. I'm old enough now and also secure enough financially that I really only want to do what I want to do.
We would work up a tune that would make me learn a drum pattern I hadn't played before. In the early stages, the pattern wouldn't just fall into place, and I would start thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the worse it would get.
I never write thinking, 'What would a woman do?' any more than I think, 'What would a man do?' It comes down to what would a solid detective do in these circumstances.
We did work together surprisingly well, more than I thought we would, because I didn't know before we met if we would actually work together really well, and we had a great time.
Is there deeply embedded change within our industry? And I would say, as a black filmmaker, it's easy for me to focus my attention on black work, but true change would include brown work, and it would include work by Asian-Americans, and it would include natives, and it would include women, and it would include more LGBTQ voices.
Everybody talks about the entitlement generation. There is no time I'd rather live in than now, and there is no generation I would more entrust the future of this country to than this one. There is a tendency to live in a nostalgic state in this country, and to think that other generations possessed an integrity and a tenacity greater than the generation that is now. I wholeheartedly disagree with that. I believe that this is a group that will rise up to any challenge that comes before them as well as any other generation in America would have done.
I think it's high time that we had a woman president. But I don't want to elect someone just because she's a woman; I want the best candidate to be elected. I think that any woman who is elected to the highest office in the land would clearly have positive role model effects for other young women.
I don't want to be pretentious about, "yes, I need to move in to the more dramatic roles and express myself and prove to everyone that I'm capable of doing it," it really isn't that, I think that's a bad reason to choose roles. It's more like, who would I be working with and would they be fun to do and entertaining to watch, is it an interesting story or character.
A girl who would fall in love so easily or want a man to love her so easily would probably get over it just as quickly, very little the worse for wear. On the contrary, a girl who would take love seriously would probably be a good while finding herself in love and would require something beyond mere friendly attentions from a man before she would think of him in that light.
There is a world-old controversy that crops up whenever women attempt to enter a new field. Is a woman fit for that work? It would seem that a woman's success in any particular field would prove her fitness for that work, without regard to theories to the contrary.
If Id lived prior to the 1980s, it would have been different, because I would have been playing to prove African Americans are equal. Now, I dont necessarily feel I have to play for black people, because obviously theyre doing everything in all sports. If I can go out there and play for myself and not feel I have to stand for something other than what I want to do, thats good.
It's always been a dream of mine to do a voice for a Disney movie. I think Disney movies and theater are very closely related. That would be amazing. I don't know about doing a Broadway musical, just because I don't really know how people do it. You just work all the time. That's something that I would definitely have to work up to.
If I had my life to live over, I would try to make more mistakes. I would relax. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I know of very few things that I would take seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would go more places. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less spinach. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary troubles.
They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.
The satisfaction comes because you work hard and it pays off. It is not as glamorous as I thought it would be, but, you know, I appreciate it more than I ever knew I would, and I love it more than I ever knew I would.
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