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" 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

Start

Pain

People

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" Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. "

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

" The big talent is persistence. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Science fiction is not formulaic. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself. "

Octavia E. Butler

Inspirational

Create

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

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

Octavia E. Butler

Science

Because

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

" How dull it is to have people defining 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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

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