American - Writer | June 22, 1947 - February 24, 2006
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
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Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
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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.
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I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
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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.
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I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
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I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
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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.
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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.
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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?'
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I'm very happy alone.
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We are a naturally hierarchical species.
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