Octavia Butler Quotes

Belief initiates and guides action - or it does nothing.

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.

I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.

The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn't find anything to complain about.

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn't vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.

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.

I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black,...an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.

He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.

I lost an arm on my last trip home.

Souls! When have you seen your own soul - that you're so certain you have one?

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

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

There's no narcotic like exhaustion.

In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.

To get along with God, Consider the consequences of your behavior. Earthseed: The Books of the Living