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" 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?' "

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" 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

Group

People

Differences

" 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

Attitude

Story

" I'm very happy alone. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

Great

Race

" 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

Adapt

Global Warming

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science

Because

" We are a naturally hierarchical species. "

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

Octavia E. Butler

Difficult

People

" 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. "

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

" The big talent is persistence. "

" My characters hope for better lives. "

" 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. "

" 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. "