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Octavia Butler [1947-2006] American

Rank: 101
Writer, Fiction writer

Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field.

Science, Alone, Art, Attitude, Chance, Courage, Fear, Food, Friendship, History, Hope, Inspirational, Leadership, Peace, Religion, Time, Work

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Art, Friendship, Time	101
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.	Inspirational	101
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.		102
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.	Alone	102
Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if 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.		103
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?		103
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.	Hope, Religion	104
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.		104
Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.	Work	105
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.		105
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.		106
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?		106
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.		107
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.	Peace	107
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.		108
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.	Fear, History	108
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.		109
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.		109
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	110
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.	Chance	110
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.	Science	111
I'm very happy alone.	Alone	111
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.		112
How dull it is to have people defining you.		112
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.		113
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.		113
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.		114
Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.		114
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.		115
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.	Courage	115
I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.		116
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.		116
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.	Science	117
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.		117
On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.		118
Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.		118
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.		119
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.	Religion	119
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.		120
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.		120
I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.	Leadership	121
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.	Attitude	121
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.		122
The big talent is persistence.		122
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.		123
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.		123
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.		124
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.		124
I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.		125
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.		125
No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.		126
I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.		126
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.		201
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.	Food	201
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.		202
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.		202
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.		203
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.		203
And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.		204
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.		204
I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.		205
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?'		205
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.		206
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.		206
But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.		207
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.		207
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.		208
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.		209
Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.		210
Science fiction is not formulaic.		211
Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.		212
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.		213
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.		214
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.		215
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.		216
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.		217
My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.		218
My characters hope for better lives.		219
We are a naturally hierarchical species.		220
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.		221
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.		222
I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.		223
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.		224
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.		225

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