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Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

Rachel Kushner

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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Losing
Making
Art
Problem
Soul
Really
Inhabiting
World
Dissolving
Technique

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

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Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.
Rachel Kushner
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Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.
Rachel Kushner
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It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.
Rachel Kushner
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L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.
Rachel Kushner
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In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.
Rachel Kushner
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My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.
Rachel Kushner
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I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
Rachel Kushner
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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
Rachel Kushner
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The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive.
Rachel Kushner
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One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
Rachel Kushner
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People who want their love easy don't really want love.
Rachel Kushner
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A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
Rachel Kushner
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To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
Rachel Kushner
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I think art is much more about an engagement with the world, a way of being called upon and recognizing that the world is speaking to you. Which isn't quite solitude, even if you're alone when it happens.
Rachel Kushner
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Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
Rachel Kushner
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And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.
Rachel Kushner
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I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.
Rachel Kushner
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I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.
Rachel Kushner
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People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
Rachel Kushner
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Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.
Rachel Kushner