Daily Inspiration Quote by Katherine Dunn

Dunn’s line lands with the quiet authority of someone who doesn’t romanticize inspiration so much as distrusts it. “Go away and come back” sounds like commonsense advice, but in a novelist’s mouth it’s a discipline: the deliberate interruption of obsession. The intent isn’t to flee the work; it’s to refuse the claustrophobia that sets in when a story becomes a sealed room where only your own ideas are circulating.

The subtext is craft, not self-care. Distance is a tool for recalibration. You go away so you can return with new data - overheard speech, a fresh shame, a different city’s weather in your bloodstream. And you come back so the work can be tested against reality, not just against the writer’s internal logic. The phrasing is telling: it’s not “leave,” it’s “go away,” a slightly childlike, almost superstitious formulation that admits how stubborn the mind can be. Sometimes the only way to see the page is to stop staring at it.

Context matters with Dunn. As the author of Geek Love, she built worlds that feel both carnivalesque and brutally intimate, a mix that requires moral clarity and imaginative risk. “Go away and come back” also reads like a rule for how to look at the grotesque without exploiting it: step back, let your certainty cool, return with sharper empathy. In a culture that treats constant output as virtue, Dunn is defending the disappearing act as part of the job - not avoidance, but the necessary reset that makes revision honest.