Katherine Dunn Quotes

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Katherine Dunn

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 24, 1945

In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.

Katherine Dunn

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

Katherine Dunn

Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

Katherine Dunn

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.

Katherine Dunn

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

Katherine Dunn

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

Katherine Dunn

My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new-world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards and palms.

Katherine Dunn

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

Katherine Dunn

My own theory about the phlegmatic qualities and properties of the English is the mountain of pure white sugar hydrocarbons they consume every day bloody day of the year - the stiff upper lip is petrified sugar; that's Bermuda's revenge, the with death, the rotting future square in the teeth of it.

Katherine Dunn

Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.

Katherine Dunn

My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.

Katherine Dunn

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.

Katherine Dunn

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

Katherine Dunn

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

Katherine Dunn

The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.

Katherine Dunn

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

Katherine Dunn

But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.

Katherine Dunn

But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.

Katherine Dunn

I think that it's really important to go away and come back.

Katherine Dunn

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

Katherine Dunn