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" 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. "

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" I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision. "

Octavia E. Butler

Courage

People

Stronger

" 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 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

Mother

Typewriter

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science

Because

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

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

" 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Tend

Careful

" 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. "

" The big talent is persistence. "

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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