Katherine Dunn

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.”

“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.”

“I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.”

“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. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.”

“But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.”

“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.”