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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
First
Six
Writing
Took
Pertaining
Much
Novel
Arduous
Years
Learned
Technical
Things
Courses
Crash
Course
Craft
Write
Crafts
Firsts
Mostly

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

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People who want their love easy don't really want love.
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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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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For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
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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To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
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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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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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