Octavia E. Butler quotes:

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.

I'm comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.

Beware:Ignorance Protects itself.IgnorancePromotes suspicion.SuspicionEngenders fear.Fear quails,Irrational and blind,Or fear looms,Defiant and closed.Blind, closed,Suspicious, afraid,IgnoranceProtects itself,And protected,Ignorance grows.

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

I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.

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?'

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.

Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

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.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.

I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.

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

My characters hope for better lives.

When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.

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.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.

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.

Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying.

A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.

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.

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

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

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.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

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.

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

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

I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.

With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.

Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.

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

Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.

If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it.

I'm very happy alone.

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.