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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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Rachel Kushner
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Eugene
Oregon
Lakes
Writer
Maybe
Part
Different
Rhys
Think
Jean
Thinking
Lake
Like
Feeding

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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
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Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
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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.
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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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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.
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Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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