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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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Octavia Butler
Humans
Need
Giving
Persecute
Different
Status
Needs
Definition
Definitions
Ones
Give

More quotes by Octavia Butler

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To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
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Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.
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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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The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
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Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
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 began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
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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I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
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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Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of 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.
Octavia Butler
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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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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 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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Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
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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But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
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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You are horror and beauty in rare combination.
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