Top 44 Katherine Dunn Quotes

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.

The denial of female aggression is a destructive myth. It robs an entire gender of a significant spectrum of power, leaving women less than equal with men and effectively keeping them ‘in their place’ and under control.

Though ‘Fat City’ was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.

In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and ’70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.

I’m just a regular Joe.

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.

It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.

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

In boxing, it just seemed to me from the time I was a very small child, we have a peculiarly civilized form in that boxers don’t screech and holler. They don’t use weapons. When the bell rings, they fight; when the bell rings again, they stop.

Donald Westlake’s lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.

Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.

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.

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.

Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.

Most professional fighters, male and female, hold day jobs, but the women’s game attracts a wide social spectrum: hash slingers, teachers, police officers, landscapers, stuntwomen. Many are wives and mothers. Their husbands or boyfriends work their corners, or hide in arena restrooms, scared to watch their bouts.

Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don’t feel that way.

At its heart, ‘Fat City’ is not about boxing. It is a universal story of grim realities and toxic delusions. It is awash with awareness of chances blown, dreams stymied, precious time wasted, and all future prospects scorched to ashes by the process.

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.

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.

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.

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

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It’s probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

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.

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that’s always very flattering.

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.

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.

The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

A film adaptation is, I hope, the director’s version. A new creation.

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.

I’d always been fascinated by boxing and became very engaged with it through my husband, actually. But I started to write about it because so many decent, righteous people wanted it banned.

I don’t think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.

Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.

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

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

I know that some of the finest writing I’ve ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they’re reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.

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.

And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet.

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

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

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.

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.

Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.