Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Octavia E. Butler

Related Quotes:

" The big talent is persistence. "

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

" 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

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

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

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

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

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

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

" 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

" My characters hope for better lives. "

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

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

" Science fiction is not formulaic. "

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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

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

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

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

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

" 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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

" 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