Karen Joy Fowler

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

I learned how to comport myself among trolls, elves, hobbits or goblins. I learned that a friend can be lost to greed and avarice. I learned that solving riddles may be as important a survival skill as bowmanship. I know how to talk to a dragon, and that it's best not to.

Miss Sarzin was the best teacher I ever had.

If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.

I have always been a generous and enthusiastic reader.

I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I've had to write what I've wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.

If we see a sad rain, it doesn't mean the rain is sad, but it means we see it. That's an easily dismissible kind of projection. But what I'm struggling to say, is that we take that rain in through our own hearts and emotions and senses and skin, and all those filters have an impact.

All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.

Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.

I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

The smart way to build a literary career is you create an identifiable product, then reliably produce that product so people know what they are going to get. That's the smart way to build a career, but not the fun way. Maybe you can think about being less successful and happier. That's an option, too.

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

I do read all my work aloud as I'm working - this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband's retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I'm alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me.

I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don't mean to complain about that.

Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.