Octavia E. Butler

"All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truthis Change. Godis Change."

"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."

"I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell."

"When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, What good is science fiction to Black people? I was usually asked this by a Black person... What good is any form of literature to Black people?What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what everyone is saying, doing, thinking -- whoever everyone happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?"

"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery."

"“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”"

"To survive,Let the past Teach you--Past customs,Struggles,Leaders and thinkers. Let These Help you. Let them inspire you,Warn you,Give you strength. But beware:God is Change. Past is past. What was Cannot Come again. To survive,know the past. Let it touch you. Then let The past Go."

"I'm very happy alone."

"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."

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

"Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not."

"A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time."

"Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself."

"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."

"“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truthis Change. Godis Change.”"

"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."

"I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things."

"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 their trust. Best to begin by teaching."

"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 human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer."

"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."