OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.

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

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

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

With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.

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 pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.

And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.

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.

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

The big talent is persistence.

Science fiction is not formulaic.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

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.

I'm very happy alone.

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

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

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

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

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 would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.

Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?