Rachel Kushner quotes - page 3

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth. (Rachel Kushner)

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

Rachel Kushner

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

Rachel Kushner

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

Rachel Kushner

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

Rachel Kushner

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

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

Rachel Kushner

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

Rachel Kushner

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)

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

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

Rachel Kushner

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

Rachel Kushner

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

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.

Rachel Kushner

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

Rachel Kushner

You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.

Rachel Kushner

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

Rachel Kushner

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