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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Guess
Interested
Listen
Speak
Art
Time
World
People
Spent

More quotes by 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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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
Rachel Kushner
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People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
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
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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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I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.
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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I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.
Rachel Kushner
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A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
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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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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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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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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I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.
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 am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
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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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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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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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