A biography for Octavia E. Butlerhasn’t been written yet.
“A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.”
“While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.”
“Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.”
“No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.”
“No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.”
“There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you.”
“Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.”
“In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.”
“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
“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.”
“Consider--We are bornNot with purpose,But with potential.”
“I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.”
“I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.”
“With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.”
“Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.”
“I had novels to write, so I wrote them.”
“And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.”
“If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?”
“BewareAt war Or at peace,More people die Of unenlightened self-interestThan of any other disease”
“I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.”