Katherine Dunn Quotes

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Katherine Dunn

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 24, 1945

Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.

Katherine Dunn

A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.

Katherine Dunn

I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.

Katherine Dunn

The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.

Katherine Dunn

Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.

Katherine Dunn

We came to Portland because there was a good alternative public school. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it. I left his dad and went to work slinging hash in a breakfast diner and working nights tending bar in a biker tavern.

Katherine Dunn

People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.

Katherine Dunn

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

Katherine Dunn

I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.

Katherine Dunn

My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter.

Katherine Dunn

My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was 2, and I have never met him and have no memory of him.

Katherine Dunn

A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Katherine Dunn

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

Katherine Dunn

We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.

Katherine Dunn

The things we do to our children - most of the evil in the world is not done with bad intentions but with the best intentions ever.

Katherine Dunn

I thought if I just told the truth, the human truth, it'd be the truth for everyone.

Katherine Dunn

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

Katherine Dunn

Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.

Katherine Dunn

Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.

Katherine Dunn

No, I've never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993. I'd been writing about the sport for a dozen years by then and wanted to know what boxers endured, what it felt like. I was too old to compete when I started, but I sparred enough to get a taste.

Katherine Dunn