Octavia Butler Quotes - Page 4

I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

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.

Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.

A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God's victim, God's plaything, God's prey.

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.

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.

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.

Souls! When have you seen your own soul - that you're so certain you have one?

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.

It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of 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.

I lost an arm on my last trip home.

You are horror and beauty in rare combination.

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.

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.

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.

Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.

I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.

I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.

But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments

The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn't vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.