Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Science
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Peace
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Truth
I'm very happy alone.Collection: Alone
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?'Collection: Science
I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.Collection: 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.Collection: Religion
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Art
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.Collection: Religion
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Alone
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
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 had novels to write, so I wrote them.
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.
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
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.
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
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.
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
I don't know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it's in the movies doesn't mean magazines are buying it.
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.
I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.
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 between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.
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.
Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.
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.
The big talent is persistence.
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
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.
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.
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
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.
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 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.
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.