Octavia E. Butler Quotes

Octavia E. Butler

Profession : Writer

Birth : June 22, 1947

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

Octavia E. Butler

Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.

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

I had novels to write, so I wrote them.

Octavia E. Butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

Octavia E. Butler

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.

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

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

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