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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Given
Misconception
Certain
Identify
Character
Author
Book
Creates
Every
Main
Really
Characters
Way
Writer
Ways

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

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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
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Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.
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 don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
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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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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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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For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
Rachel Kushner
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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.
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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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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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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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
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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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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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 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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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. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.
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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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