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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
World
Alone
Upon
Art
Recognizing
Happens
Engagement
Even
Speaking
Much
Solitude
Think
Quite
Thinking
Called

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

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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.
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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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
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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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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
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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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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Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
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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For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
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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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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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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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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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 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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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 who want their love easy don't really want love.
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