Rachel Kushner Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Rachel Kushner

  Book, Writing, Men

  "Rachel Kushner: The Useless Truth". Interview with Jonathan Lee, www.guernicamag.com. February 17, 2014.

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• I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

  Rachel Kushner

  Believe, Outcomes, Chaos

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Writing, Years, Crafts

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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

  Knowing, Narrators, Firsts

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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

  Art, Soul, Technique

  "The Flamethrowers". Book by Rachel Kushner, April 2, 2013.

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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

  Art, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

  Rachel Kushner

  Responsibility

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that.

  Rachel Kushner

  Fun, Thinking, Quality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is no single formula for good sentence. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times, the formula is almost purely one of context. And yet other times, of sheer precision of meaning. This is a good sentence: "Just as he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom, Shrike caught his arm." "Warm mud of alcoholic gloom" is exact and right and accurate.

  Rachel Kushner

  Giving, Sometimes, Invisible

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

  Thinking, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

  Rachel Kushner

  Art, Risk, Realms

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.

  Rachel Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Female

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

  Rachel Kushner

  Thinking, Agency, Motorcycle

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.

  Rachel Kushner

  Hard Work, Writing, Never Quit

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

  Rachel Kushner

  Real, Motorcycle, Appeals

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Writing, Trying, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Mean, Thinking, Risk

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.

  Rachel Kushner

  Art, Community, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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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

  Real, Ideas, World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

  Rachel Kushner

  Toss, Authenticity, Photograph

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Book, Ideas, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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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

  Growing Up, Kids, Smell

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

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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

  Book, Character, Novel

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

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