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All Quotes by author - Octavia E. Butler

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically. "

" Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is. "

" How dull it is to have people defining you. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for? "

Genetic Engineering

" I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play. "

" I had novels to write, so I wrote them. "

" I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm very happy alone. "

" 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 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. "

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

" I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision. "

" 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?' "

" I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking. "

" 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. "

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

" Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that. "

" Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it. "

" My characters hope for better lives. "

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