Katherine Dunn

“The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort”

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnera...”

“Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No....”

“I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can't tell where I leave off and the books begin. I'm nobody. I'm a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutt...”

“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...”

“My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of ton...”

“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.”

“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 write...”

“Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The boxing booths at English fairs featured w...”

“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.”

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

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

“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 brea...”

“I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.”

“Every doorway, every intersection has a story.”

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

“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 e...”

“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...”

“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...”

“In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival...”