About Octavia E. Butler: Octavia Estelle Butler is nicknamed the "Genius Grant".
It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back thei...
In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.
You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when huma...
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
Power came the way a child came -- with agony.
If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.
My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than ...
Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you'll ever be published or paid or even that you'll be able to finish the particular work you've begun. It isn't easy to persist amid all that. [...] Some...
Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said that you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer.
Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germa...
A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
My characters hope for better lives.
My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
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.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation. But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through.
