Quotes from Katherine Dunn

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

I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can't die soon enough.

I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.

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.

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

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 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.

What's bred in the bones, when you have bones, comes through. And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.

there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.

How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born. There

The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous.

Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.