Quotes from 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.

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.

We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

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.

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.

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.

I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.

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.

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.

It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.

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.

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

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

Some writers get snooty about what happens when their books are adapted to film, but I don't feel that way.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.

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.

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

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.

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

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

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.