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

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

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I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.
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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.
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I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
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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 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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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.
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People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
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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.
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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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For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
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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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To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
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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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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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