Katherine Dunn

"The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort"

"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."

"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."

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

"Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate."

"The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure."

"I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings."

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

"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."

"Nudity and explicit sex are far more easily available now than are clear images of death. The quasi-violence of movies and television dwells on the lively acts of killing – flying kicks, roaring weapons, crashing cars, flaming explosions. These are the moral equivalents of old-time cinematic sex. The fictional spurting of gun muzzles after flirtation and seduction but stop a titillating instant short of actual copulation. The results of such aggressive vivacity remain a mystery. The corpse itself, riddled and gaping, swelling or dismembered, the action of heat and bacteria, of mummification or decay are the most illicit pornography."

"The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. 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. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites."

"I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating."

"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."