Octavia E. Butler

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.

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

I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.

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.

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.

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if 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.

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

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

Science fiction is not formulaic.

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

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

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.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.