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"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."
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"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
"Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write."
"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
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."
"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."
"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."
"Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish."
"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."
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