A biography for Octavia E. Butlerhasn’t been written yet.
“If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.”
“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?'”
“I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.”
“On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.”
“I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.”
“Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.”
“Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.”
“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.”
“Your teachersAre all around you.All that you perceive,All that you experience,All that is given to youor taken from you,All that you love or hate,need or fearWill teach you--If you will learn.God is your firstand your last teacher.God is your harshest teacher:subtle,demanding.Learn or die.”
“Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.”
“I began writing about power because I had so little.”
“Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.”
“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.”
“But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.”
“My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.”
“Power came the way a child came -- with agony.”
“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.”
“There must be good marriages somewhere, but to me, marriage had the feel of people tolerating each other, enduring each other because they were afraid to be alone or because each was a habit that the other couldn't quite break.”
“I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.”