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" 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

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" 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

" Science fiction is not formulaic. "

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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. "

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'm very happy alone. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Genetic Engineering

" 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 frees you to go anyplace and examine anything. "

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" The big talent is persistence. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" We are a naturally hierarchical species. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

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