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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.
Katherine Dunn -
Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
Katherine Dunn
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We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn
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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.
Katherine Dunn -
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
Katherine Dunn -
I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
Katherine Dunn -
People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.
Katherine Dunn -
It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'
Katherine Dunn -
'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.
Katherine Dunn
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Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
I thought if I just told the truth, the human truth, it'd be the truth for everyone.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn
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A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.
Katherine Dunn -
No, I've never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993. I'd been writing about the sport for a dozen years by then and wanted to know what boxers endured, what it felt like. I was too old to compete when I started, but I sparred enough to get a taste.
Katherine Dunn -
I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love.
Katherine Dunn -
The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
Katherine Dunn