Octavia Butler Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.”

“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.”