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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Moral
True
Real
Authentic
Something
Claim
Claims
Ground
Regard
High

More quotes by 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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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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To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
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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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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For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
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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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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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 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 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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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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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 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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People who want their love easy don't really want love.
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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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
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I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
Rachel Kushner
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Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
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