Katherine Dunn Quotes

I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

I worked on a farm for a little bit.

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

As I grew older, farms in Kentucky provided me with many jobs in hauling hay and in cutting tobacco. In addition to helping fund my college years, these jobs helped me to meet an array of very interesting and amazing men and women.

The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.

I was a hard-workin' little boy. Oh, I worked. Pullin' cotton, shockin' grain, cuttin' wheat, loadin' wheat, choppin' cotton, cleanin' chicken houses, milkin' cows, plowin'.

In his new autobiography, 'Capital Gaines,' Chip talks about the farm work - and he says he does, in fact, do it himself.

I worked in rose fields, and I worked in potato fields. I did some bouncing.

I had a lot of jobs when I was younger. Where I grew up, there was a lot of agricultural jobs, so I worked on a lot of farms. I worked in the pea fields, harvesting peas.

The strength that I have comes from irrigating the citrus plantation, ploughing in the vineyard, guarding the melon fields at night. I believe that's what gave me the strength.

I was raised on a little farm about 12 miles out of Portsmouth, Ohio.

I'm a farm boy. If we need five people to haul in hay, we don't take one and just work them to death.

I was working on the farm to get in shape, about a mile away from my parents. You know, I did everything as a kid to stay in shape - jogging, work on the farm, driving the tractor. I'll never forget.

I grew up around the corner from my grandparents' dairy farm, which was three miles outside of a small town called Phoenix.

It is actually costlier to hire an immigrant. And yet the farm worker is almost invariably an immigrant. You can't pay an American to pick blueberries.

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something.

In essence, I'm a sophisticated cotton picker.

I plowed fields with horses and worked as a hired hand in high school for 50 cents a day.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

We keep horses. I have to keep working.

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.

I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.

I feel closest to God with a pitchfork full of crap in my hands. I'm serious!