Rachel Kushner Quotes About Character

Quotes about: Character

• 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.

  Rachel Kushner

  Book, Character, Way

  "Rachel Kushner’s Reno, L.a., And New York". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 20, 2013.

• I was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult.

  Rachel Kushner

  Children, Character, Artist

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Book, Character, Novel

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Character, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• As to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.

  Rachel Kushner

  Real, Lying, Believe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect.

  Rachel Kushner

  Character, Understanding, Helping

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

  Rachel Kushner

  Book, Character, Ideas

• 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

  Character, People, Childhood

  "I Am a Camera: An Interview with Rachel Kushner" by Sasha Frere-Jones, www.newyorker.com. June 11, 2013.

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