Art & Creativity Quote by Katherine Dunn

Dunn’s line lands like a joke told with a straight face: an over-the-top threat aimed at a very specific kind of complacency. The “stomped on” is cartoon violence, but it’s also a moral claim. For her, stories aren’t cute personal possessions; they’re perishable goods. If you have one and you don’t write it, you’re hoarding something that should be made public, or at least made real.

The intent is less elitist than it sounds. Dunn isn’t saying everyone will be good, or even published. She’s flattening the hierarchy that treats writing as a priesthood. “Everybody should write” turns the act into a basic civic practice, like voting or cooking: imperfect, necessary, learnable. The cruelty in the second sentence functions as a dare, a jab at the endless excuses that masquerade as humility: I’m not ready, I’m not talented, I’ll do it later. She refuses to romanticize silence.

Context matters: Dunn wrote with a freak-show tenderness in a culture that often pressures writers to sand down their weirdness into “relatable” product. Her impatience reads as an ethic of witness. Stories are not just therapy or content; they’re a record of particular lives, especially the ones that get edited out. The joke is aggressive because the stakes are, too: the world will happily stomp on your story first. Writing is how you stomp back.