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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.

Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler
Wasn
Feel
Ancestry
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Psychological
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Slavery
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Stones
People
Across
Emotional

More quotes by Octavia Butler

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Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
Octavia Butler
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People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.
Octavia Butler
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I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Octavia Butler
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The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.
Octavia Butler
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And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
Octavia Butler
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Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
Octavia Butler
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There's no narcotic like exhaustion.
Octavia Butler
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But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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The essentials are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work to educate and benefit their community, their families and themselves and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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You are horror and beauty in rare combination.
Octavia Butler
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To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
Octavia Butler
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There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
Octavia Butler
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I'm trying to speak--to write-the truth. Im trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.
Octavia Butler
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The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
Octavia Butler
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The big talent is persistence.
Octavia Butler