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I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler
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More quotes by Octavia Butler

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If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.
Octavia Butler
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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.
Octavia Butler
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Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.
Octavia Butler
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Not everyone has been a bully or the victim of bullies, but everyone has seen bullying, and seeing it, has responded to it by joining in or objecting, by laughing or keeping silent, by feeling disgusted or feeling interested.
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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I lost an arm on my last trip home.
Octavia Butler
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Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
Octavia Butler
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Belief initiates and guides action - or it does nothing.
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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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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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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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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There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
Octavia Butler
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On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.
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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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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Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.
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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When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
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