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I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

Rachel Kushner

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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Idea
Character
Ideas
Book
Kind
Imagery
Poetic
Image
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More quotes by 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
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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 don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.
Rachel Kushner
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A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
Rachel Kushner
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People who want their love easy don't really want love.
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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In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, good efforts. Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.
Rachel Kushner
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I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
Rachel Kushner
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You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not. But, from writing about art, I had met some artists in L.A. They said, Why don't you try living out here? So I traded apartments with the painter Delia Brown. That was in 2003. I loved it. I still love living there.
Rachel Kushner
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I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?
Rachel Kushner
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People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.
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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The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.
Rachel Kushner
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I like to think each writer is doing his or her part. Feeding the lake, as Jean Rhys said. And maybe there are different lakes.
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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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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People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.
Rachel Kushner
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Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.
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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Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
Rachel Kushner