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

Octavia E. Butler

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" Science fiction is not formulaic. "

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

" The big talent is persistence. "

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

" 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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

" 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

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

" We are a naturally hierarchical species. "

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

Octavia E. Butler