Quotes from 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.

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.

Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.

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

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.

Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.

I think that it's really important to go away and come back.

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.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.

Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.

A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.

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.

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.

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

Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.

I'm just a regular Joe.

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.