I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the early fascination and commitment of the author to the genre of science fiction.
Octavia Butler reflects on the significant role that science fiction played in her life from a young age. By starting to read and write in this genre before she reached her teenage years, she highlights the formative influence of science fiction, suggesting that it not only shaped her identity as a writer but also her understanding of creativity and imagination.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of childhood reading habits on future careers.
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.
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
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.
Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.
Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.
Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.
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