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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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Octavia Butler
Trying
Interested
Achieve
Clear
Speak
Clarity
Write
Fancy
Truth
Originals
Writing
Original
Even
Plenty

More quotes by 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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When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
Octavia Butler
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I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
Octavia Butler
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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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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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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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.
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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To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
Octavia Butler
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Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once you did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though you had stolen thoughts from their minds.
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
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We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.
Octavia Butler
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No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
Octavia Butler
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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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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 raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
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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I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
Octavia Butler