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First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler
Stories
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Habit
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Polish
Forget
Sustain
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More quotes by Octavia Butler

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I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
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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.
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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.
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All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles,and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.
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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
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I think climbing mountains or buildings or whatever has been a really good metaphor for finishing my work. Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can't possibly do this, somehow you do.
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There's no narcotic like exhaustion.
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I lost an arm on my last trip home.
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But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
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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.
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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.
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I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing.
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Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.
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To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living
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Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
Octavia Butler
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Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.
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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.
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He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
Octavia Butler
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Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler