“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
“We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women’s aggression isn’t considered real. It isn’t dangerous; it’s only cute. Or it’s always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster – an ‘unnatural’ woman.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Every doorway, every intersection has a story.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― 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 ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Women are real. Our reality covers the whole human megillah, from feeble to fierce, from bad to good, from endangered to dangerous. We don’t just deserve power, we have it. And power in this and every other society is not just the capacity to benefit those around us.”
― 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 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.”
― 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 boxing booths at English fairs featured women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
― 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
“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
“Let’s just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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 tool.”
― Katherine Dunn
“But the idea that women can’t take care of themselves still permeates our culture.”
― Katherine Dunn
“This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.”
― Katherine Dunn
“There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.”
― 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 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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I’m slow by everybody’s standards. But not by mine.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I’m like every waitress in every diner; I’m like every mom driving her kids to school. I’m nothing special at all.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I’m just a regular Joe.”
― Katherine Dunn
“In a really good, closely matched situation, the style of the boxer is every bit as explicit and specific to him as a painter’s hand.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don’t feel that way.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“A film adaptation is, I hope, the director’s version. A new creation.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Donald Westlake’s lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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 tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I don’t think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.”
― 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
“I think it is the natural and innate function of certain organisms to secrete beauty in permanent forms we call artworks, to respond to beauty by answering its discovery with a new beauty.”
― 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
“I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― Katherine Dunn
“I’ve met some of the most interesting, dimensional, and kind people of my life in that subculture and around the sport. And it seems to me that boxing is one of those structures that is designed to promote harmony. I think that it is a stove that contains that fire in us and makes it safe and useful.”
― Katherine Dunn
“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.”
― 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 movies.”
― Katherine Dunn
“Though ‘Fat City’ was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.”
― Katherine Dunn
“’The Iliad’ includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.”
― Katherine Dunn
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