Octavia E. Butler Quotes

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

How dull it is to have people defining you.

- Octavia E. Butler

Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

- Octavia E. Butler

The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

- Octavia E. Butler

Science fiction is not formulaic.

- Octavia E. Butler

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?'

- Octavia E. Butler

Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.

- Octavia E. Butler

I had novels to write, so I wrote them.

- Octavia E. Butler

I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

- Octavia E. Butler

I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

The big talent is persistence.

- Octavia E. Butler

Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.

- Octavia E. Butler

When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

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

If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?

- Octavia E. Butler

Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.

- Octavia E. Butler

I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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.

- Octavia E. Butler

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

- Octavia E. Butler

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

- Octavia E. Butler

Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.

- Octavia E. Butler

I'm very happy alone.

- Octavia E. Butler