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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Going
Structure
Explained
Way
Childhood
Shy
People
Characters
Recent
Depends
Incredibly
Events
Plot
Ways
Event
Away
Eventually
Behaving
Character
Complicated
Trauma

More quotes by 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.
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I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.
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People who want their love easy don't really want love.
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The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.
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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.
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When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
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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.
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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.
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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
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People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
Rachel Kushner