Octavia E. Butler People Quotations

When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.

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

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.

Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.

I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision.

The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.

Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.

Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.

I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.

Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.

Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.

How dull it is to have people defining you.

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.

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.