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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science Fiction

" 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. "

Octavia E. Butler

" The big talent is persistence. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

" 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'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

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

" We are a naturally hierarchical species. "

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

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

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 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

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

Octavia E. Butler

" 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