Katherine Dunn Quotes

I look at this game from a different perspective.

To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.

I always have a different way of looking at things.

I'd like to be known as the person who saw things from a different point of view to others.

Writers sometimes write things for me and I like to see what they write because I want to see what their take on my delivery is or what they think that I can do with something. So I kind of leave that to them.

It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.

If you're looking where everybody else is looking, you're looking in the wrong spot.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.

To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar misquotation.

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school.

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.

Hunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.

The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised as much.

When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.

The wonderful thing about theater is that anything, no matter how tendentious, no matter how stupid it sounds at first glance, can be made to work if it is charged with freshness and originality. You can have an entirely political Shakespeare production and I'll be sitting on the edge of my seat as long as it's surprising, as long as it's not just the standard, "out of the box" pseudo-transgressive production that we just see too much of nowadays.

You know, I hate to borrow Apple's tag, but think different. Really. From the very beginning. I didn't know what the fast-food rules were. I got my training at the Culinary Institute Of America, and then I opened up a fast food place according to fine dining rules.

Great minds don't think alike. If they did, the Patent Office would only have about fifty inventions.

You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you've got a writer who's clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one.