Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.
Rachel Kushner
Image
People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.
Rachel Kushner