Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

I spent my college years studying what I enjoyed semester to semester-a little Spanish literature here, a little psychology there, a little marketing in between.

Why limit yourself to one discipline or field of study?

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.

When I was an academic, I'd sometimes get a little feeling of excitement when I had an idea that was, I hoped, fresh. And whether anyone should act on that idea is a very different question.

It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting.

I'm such a generalist. I love everything. If I had the opportunity, I think I would do about 10 different degrees, five different master's degrees, probably as many Ph.D.s, and you can't do that.

I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.

I like doing scholarship for its own sake.

I don't necessarily want a higher education, I want a wider education. I want to know everything and experience everything.

Within the university... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.

Although I was four years at the University [of Wisconsin], I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer.

I feel like I'm sort of afraid to study too much because I feel like I work as I go, but I want to study the classics and also the technical aspects of things. I'm always looking to understand more.

I obtained a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Fellowship and entered the graduate program in History at the University of California. With no Greek or French and minimal Latin and German, I was in no position to pursue my classical interests, so I began work at Berkeley with little more than an open mind.

Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.

The type of science that I do is sometimes known as 'curiosity-driven research.' This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain.

I am grateful to my colleagues at Brandeis and to the unusual environment here that allows researchers to explore without boundaries while also engaging students in the process of discovery. This is a very special - perhaps unique - university.

I studied social studies at Harvard, which makes it sound like I was in seventh grade. It was a choose-your-own-adventure major, where you could decide what you were going to focus on.

While I was a student at The Cooper Union, they discouraged too much of a focus on any one medium, and it helped me try new and different things.

My father claimed I could read before I went to school. I sucked up knowledge and read the Children's Britannica Encyclopaedia from cover to cover when I was eight.