One Only Child to Another

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was the first prominent black female, science fiction writer. She wrote:

I've been telling myself stories since I was four years old. I was an only child, shy and often alone. Telling myself stories was my way of entertaining myself.

I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial--a hermit in the middle of Seattle--a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

Quoted from the back matter and supporting materials for the Grand Central Publishing edition of Parable of the Sower.