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"I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that."
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"True wisdom often comes from the experience of failure-not from success."

"It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course."

"The intelligent are candles, the virtuous are torches, the wise are lamps, and the enlightened are stars."

"Wisdom is not in intelligence but in simplicity."

"Ignorance is your opponent, fear is your enemy, vice is your adversary, virtue is your friend, and wisdom is your helper."

"Sometimes only when opportunity stops banging to be let in do we notice its absence!"
Explore more quotes by Octavia Butler

"I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black."

"Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it."

"What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way."

"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."

"No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly."

"No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities."

"While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything."

"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."

"People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me."
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