Octavia E. Butler

“The big talent is persistence.”

“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.”

“I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.”

“I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.”

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.”

“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.”

“We are a naturally hierarchical species.”

“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.”

“You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.”