Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
True
Suspicious
Ideas
Authentic
Real
False
World
Bunch
Short
Ones
Pretty
Idea

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

Image
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
Image
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
Image
People who want their love easy don't really want love.
Rachel Kushner
Image
I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
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
I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.
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
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
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
People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
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
Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
Rachel Kushner
Image
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.
Rachel Kushner
Image
I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
Rachel Kushner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.
Rachel Kushner
Image
I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.
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 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