Octavia Butler Quotes

But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.

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I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

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On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.

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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.

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

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I have the kind of mind that demands that I work things out, to see how they would really work if they were real. I have to be able to do that.

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I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

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Fantasy is totally wide open all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

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Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

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No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.

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And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.

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Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.

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So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

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I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

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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.

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Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.

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Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.

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I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

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You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

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I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

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Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.

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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.

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Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

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No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

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I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.

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