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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
Writer
Maybe
Part
Different
Rhys
Think
Jean
Thinking
Lake
Like
Feeding
Lakes

More quotes by Rachel Kushner

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A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
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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 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.
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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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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 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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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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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.
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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 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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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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Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
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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Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
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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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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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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I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.
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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