Octavia E. Butler Quotes

"Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself."

"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."

"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."

"The big talent is persistence."

"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."

"Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?"

"I'm very happy alone."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time."

"Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things."

"I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you."

"Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy."

"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."

"I'm not pessimistic about much of anything."

"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."

"Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

"Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun."

"I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell."