Octavia E. Butler

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

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.

My characters hope for better lives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Science fiction is not formulaic.

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.