Latest Rachel Kushner Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

  Rachel Kushner

  Children, War, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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.

  Rachel Kushner

  Pain, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• While it might be true that our reality would suggest that more writers would address these elemental issues of modern life - work, the marketplace, brutality, race - I'm not sure I have enough of a sense in aggregate of what the dominant novelists are doing to comment on why less do, or if less do. Maybe that's partly because I don't feel woven into any kind of fabric of contemporaries; I just read what I read, and do what I do.

  Rachel Kushner

  Reality, Kind, Modern

  Source: www.guernicamag.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 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.

  Rachel Kushner

  Artist, Thinking, Morris

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Solitude

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's an essential ingredient to making, to art. Certainly on a practical level it is. But on the other hand, I think it's a myth that the creative inspiration is locked up inside the person and just needs a quiet space and the right "serious" brooding moment to get released.

  Rachel Kushner

  Art, Inspiration, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.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

• 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

• At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.

  Rachel Kushner

  People, Age

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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 unfortunately true that if you mess up a single detail of the art world the whole thing seems false, and most writers are not in a position to get the details right, because they don't hang around with artists. It's not something you can get the vague gist of. It's too specific.

  Rachel Kushner

  Art, Artist, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

  Rachel Kushner

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

• 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

• People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

  Rachel Kushner

  People, Complicated

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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