Katherine Dunn

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

— Katherine Dunn

It's not unfair, I think, to describe boxers as a demographic little given to literary entanglement. In general, with exceptions, they prefer…

— Katherine Dunn

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

— Katherine Dunn

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

— Katherine Dunn

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence…

— Katherine Dunn

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got…

— Katherine Dunn

Were also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal…

— Katherine Dunn

The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and…

— Katherine Dunn

Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently…

— Katherine Dunn

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the…

— Katherine Dunn

[I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love…

— Katherine Dunn

Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of…

— 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…

— Katherine Dunn

I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport…

— Katherine Dunn

Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The…

— Katherine Dunn

At its heart, 'Fat City' is not about boxing. It is a universal story of grim realities and toxic delusions. It is…

— Katherine Dunn

In a really good, closely matched situation, the style of the boxer is every bit as explicit and specific to him as…

— 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…

— Katherine Dunn

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.

— Katherine Dunn

Basically, we are pack animals. We may be evolving toward hive animals. The nature of the pack is that if all the…

— Katherine Dunn

“A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides…

— Katherine Dunn

In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we…

— Katherine Dunn

My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school:…

— Katherine Dunn

People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course…

— Katherine Dunn

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of…

— Katherine Dunn

Most professional fighters, male and female, hold day jobs, but the women's game attracts a wide social spectrum: hash slingers, teachers, police…

— 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…

— Katherine Dunn

Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early…

— Katherine Dunn

“It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff [whiskey]. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of…

— Katherine Dunn

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is…

— Katherine Dunn

Just as a snowflakewent on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, thepumpkin patch is a gathering…

— Katherine Dunn

Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes…

— Katherine Dunn

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange…

— Katherine Dunn

“Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they…

— Katherine Dunn