Octavia E. Butler Quotes

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

My writing is a very authentic journey of discovery. I'm going out there to learn who I am. My readers, consequently, take the same journey as my protagonist.

Going to drama school was the start of my journey of discovery and getting to know myself.

In the writing, I'm just trying to go deeper, emotionally, and learn more about myself and reveal more and find a way to connect with people in new ways.

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

There's no question that you can explore aspects of yourself through roles that you play, and you get a chance to investigate yourself; that's healthy, and it's therapeutic in a way. But if you're indulging yourself, exploration at the cost of the story or the project, that's not good.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

I have a lot of fun writing for artists, but I'm learning to apply that fun to myself.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I felt that with 'In A Perfect World' I was still kind of finding myself - not just as a musician, but also in love and in life.

With a lot of comedies, the characters go on a journey, and they come back, and they're the exact same people.