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Quote by Rachel Kushner

“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.”

Quote by Rachel Kushner

Author

Rachel Kushner (b. 1968) is an acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her notable works include Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, and The Mars Room. Known for her historical depth, complex narratives, and sharp cultural critique, Kushner explores American history, politics, and identity through richly layered prose. Her novel The Mars Room was a finalist for the 2018 Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize. more

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“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.”

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“Being on the Reebok brand for eight years now, I understand where their focus is and who they cater their on-court and off-court shoes towards. Right now, it's basically the movement. There's a new retro- it's in style, it's hot and again it's all about comfort. Comfort for me is everything. I've played many and many of basketball games and so now when I'm off the court, I still want to put something on that's comfortable but still be able to have the style of a basketball-type shoe.”

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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.”

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“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.”

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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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“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.”

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“There is greatness in the fear of God, contentment in faith of God, and honour in humility.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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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.”

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