Octavia E. Butler

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

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.

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.

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.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.

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

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.

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

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

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

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

And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.

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.

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.

But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.

No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm not pessimistic about much of anything.

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

My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.

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.

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

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 had novels to write, so I wrote them.

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.

Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.

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.

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.

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

Science fiction is not formulaic.

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

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.

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.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

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.

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

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.

How dull it is to have people defining you.