Octavia Butler Writing Quotes & Sayings

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 E. Butler

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader. — Karen Joy Fowler

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about. — Octavia E. Butler

It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it ... I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that. — Octavia Butler

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest. — Octavia Butler

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if 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

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 E. Butler

Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage. — Octavia Butler

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things. — Octavia E. Butler

Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically. — Octavia E. Butler

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell. — Octavia E. Butler

The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing. — Octavia Butler

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. [ ... ] Sometimes when I'm interviewed, the interviewer either compliments me on my 'talent', my 'gift' or asks me how I discovered it. [ ... ] I used to struggle to answer this politely, to explain that I didn't believe much in writing talent. 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 E. Butler

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black. — Octavia Butler

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing. — Octavia Butler

Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don't like the labels, they're marketing tools, and I certainly don't worry about them when I'm writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek. — Octavia Butler

I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking. — Octavia E. Butler

Bloodchild" is my pregnant man story. — Octavia E. Butler

I can write my own stories and I can write myself in. — Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it. — Karen Joy Fowler

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 E. Butler

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 E. Butler

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life. — Octavia E. Butler

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 E. Butler

Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun. — Octavia E. Butler

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

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

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

I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play. — Octavia E. Butler

Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.9 — Octavia E. Butler

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

I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing, — Octavia Butler

Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say them, couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled inside me. — Octavia E. Butler