Quote

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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Think
Built
Account
Thinking
Novel
Drive
Life
Happen
Essential
People
Space
Fit
Understand
Parts
Indicate
Character
Conflict
Contradictions
Together
Elements
Contradiction
Something
Exist
Truths

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 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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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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To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
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 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
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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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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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When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
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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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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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 regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
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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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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People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
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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Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.
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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A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
Rachel Kushner