Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I know a lot of people are where I was several years ago, when I was getting started with writing, wondering how they might get started as writers. 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. Second, read every day. Read voraciously and omnivorously, whatever's out there. You never know what's gonna grab you. Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes-they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes-a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day. 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. Those are some of the suggestions I give to my young writers. (2004)

Now I have been raped.
It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America.

I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and went into competition with it. But I think I stayed with it because it was so wide open. It gave me the chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek. And the truth is, there are no closed doors, and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling. (p183)

If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

:To be led by a thief

He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.

When it comes to strangers with guns," I told her, "I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.

:And at last to embrace it

There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.

All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles.
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design,
Who will dominate.
All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles, And most
are no more intellectual
than two rams
knocking their heads together.

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.

I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.