Octavia Butler famous quotes

07-12-2025

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
-- Octavia Butler

#Freedom #Equality #People
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
-- Octavia Butler

#Writing #Stories #Wanted
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

#Wall #Fiction #Hem
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

#Struggle #Two #Design
The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
-- Octavia Butler

#Truth Is #Lasting
Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.
-- Octavia Butler

#Fighting #People #Sometimes
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.
-- Octavia Butler

#Change #God #Truth Is
I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
-- Octavia Butler

#Ambition #Years #Oil
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

#Inspiration #Writing #Persistence
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
-- Octavia Butler

#Demand #World #Ends
In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.
-- Octavia Butler

#Phoenix #Order #Firsts
When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
-- Octavia Butler

#Rage #Choke
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

#Writing #Frustration #Profession
Beware: Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows.
-- Octavia Butler

#Ignorance #Blind #Quails
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

#Writing #Persistence #Thinking
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.
-- Octavia Butler

#Friendship #Letting Go #Art
If you want a thing--truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible
-- Octavia Butler

#Air #Desire #Why Not
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

#Bullying #Laughing #Feelings
Kindness eases change Love quiets fear
-- Octavia Butler

#Kindness #Ease
No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
-- Octavia Butler

#Writing #Long #Comeback
That which could hunger, could starve.
-- Octavia Butler

#Hunger
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
-- Octavia Butler

#Civilization #People #Way
I lost an arm on my last trip home.
-- Octavia Butler

#Home #Arms #Lasts
It's when people begin using their religion as just a way of getting power over other people that scares me. I'm afraid that's what's going on in a lot of cases right now. When people deliberately tell lies, Creationism for instance, and pretend, "Oh, it's not really religion." I mean they know they're lying, and yet they're the religious people. There's something wrong there.
-- Octavia Butler

#Religious #Lying #Mean
Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you canâ€™t do with an ugly one? Nothing. Itâ€™s just a matter of preference.
-- Octavia Butler

#Beautiful #Ugly #Matter
I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.
-- Octavia Butler

#Writing #Alive #Theory
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

#Writing #Persistence #Stories

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