I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the early fascination and commitment of the author to the genre of science fiction.
Octavia Butler reflects on the significant role that science fiction played in her life from a young age. By starting to read and write in this genre before she reached her teenage years, she highlights the formative influence of science fiction, suggesting that it not only shaped her identity as a writer but also her understanding of creativity and imagination.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of childhood reading habits on future careers.
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
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.
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
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.
Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
Movie acting is primarily listening. If you're really engaged, that's all a movie audience wants to see is you processing what's happening in your world.
I try to create characters people want to sit with, even if nothing is happening.
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable.
They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived
Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
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