Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I was going to be a scientist.

I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

I can't sit down long enough to absorb any kind of learning.

I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends.

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

I love to be a scientist. I've always enjoyed being curious.

During this time I had the singular good fortune of being able to discuss the problem constantly with Einstein. Some experiments done at Einstein's suggestion yielded no decisively new result.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me - it was the sublime quality of patience - patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment - which I sadly lacked.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

I have a study now - I used not to. I also love working in cafes; ignoring noise is good for concentration.

In the power of fixing the attention lies the most precious of the intellectual habits.

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems.

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

Everybody, as soon as they do a good experiment, their first thought in this lab is, 'That can't be right. I must have screwed it up. What did I do wrong?' And that's the best kind of scientist because they're filled with this self-doubt. And if I'm going to be honest, that's who I am. And it's what drives me.