Katherine Dunn Quotes
I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
Quotes to Explore
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When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of.
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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If I were trying to impress a girl, I wouldn't get all super dressed because I would look like I was trying too hard. Instead, I would probably wear what I normally would.
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Hard writing makes easy reading.
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Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
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Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
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I have no interest in writing, directing or producing.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.
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When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
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I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.
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I love the whole process for each new album. The writing, the touring, everything. For me, it never gets old.
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The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.
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One thing I've had to realize in my career is that I can't do it all. Sometimes we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make sure we're writing the next hit. There are other people out there, and that's what they do every day, and they have strengths that I don't have.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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I guess the wildcard here is Terrence Malick. He supervised me while I was writing the script for Beautiful Country, and he is a genius, although not always easy to follow. What I learned from him is that the narrative can be tracked through all kinds of scenes, that the strong narrative thread is not always the one that is most obvious. Creating narrative with Malick was a bit like chasing a butterfly through a jungle. This approach to narrative is fun and complicated, something that makes the process of writing constantly interesting to this writer.
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It's very hypocritical to constantly say, 'We want to keep our kids close,' then send them home with so much homework that family time becomes nonexistent.
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Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.
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I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
