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"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."
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"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
"I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
"When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults."
"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."
Explore more quotes by Octavia Butler
"The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way."
"So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy."
"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."
"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."
"No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly."
"I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining."
"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."
"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."
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