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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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?' "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" We are a naturally hierarchical species. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" Science fiction is not formulaic. "

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

Genetic Engineering

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction