Top 80 Octavia Butler Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Octavia Butler

52. “Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.”

— Octavia Butler

53. “We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.”

— Octavia Butler

54. “Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it’s useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.”

— Octavia Butler

55. “Most of us don’t have to worry about being shot of 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

56. “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.”

— Octavia Butler

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn’t had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.”

— Octavia Butler

60. “Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about.”

— Octavia Butler

61. “The thing about science fiction is that it’s totally wide open. But it’s wide open in a conditional way.”

— Octavia Butler

62. “There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.”

— Octavia Butler

63. “A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating. It’s so easy as a young writer to think you’re been very clear when in fact you haven’t.”

— Octavia Butler

64. “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 Butler

65. “I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.”

— Octavia Butler

66. “I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.”

— Octavia Butler

67. “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

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

— Octavia Butler

69. “Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.”

— Octavia Butler

70. “That which could hunger, could starve.”

— Octavia Butler

71. “Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They’re every writer’s rite of passage.”

— Octavia Butler

72. “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.”

— Octavia Butler

73. “I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”

— Octavia Butler

74. “But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.”

— Octavia Butler

75. “Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we’re as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”

— Octavia Butler

76. “Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can’t do with an ugly one? Nothing. It’s just a matter of preference.”

— Octavia Butler

77. “Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one.”

— Octavia Butler

78. “Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.”

— Octavia Butler

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

— Octavia Butler

80. “I would never have been a good scientist – my attention span was too short for that.”

— Octavia Butler

81. “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 Butler

82. “Third, for people who aren’t doing it already, take classes – they’re worthwhile. Workshops or classes – a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.”

— Octavia Butler

83. “Souls! When have you seen your own soul – that you’re so certain you have one?”

— Octavia Butler

84. “Sometimes people say I look grim or angry. Better to have them think that than know the truth. Better to have them think anything than let them know just how easy it is to hurt me.”

— Octavia Butler

85. “You need other people to let you know whether you’re communicating what you think you are and whether you’re doing it in ways that are not only accessible and entertaining, but as compelling as you can make them.”

— Octavia Butler