Rachel Kushner Quotes

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I always write my music based on what is going on in my life at the time.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

I never dreamed that the little ditties I wrote about annoying customers or bagel recipes would turn into a full-length musical comedy. But a very wise person told me to 'write what you know'. So I did.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

I really believe that every character comes from the well of the artist.

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

I have a huge note on my phone where things just start popping up. It doesn't make that much sense to me at the time, but once a song is finished, I can read into it and figure out who the characters are in my life.

Anything that's really made an impact on my life, I want to get in the studio and write about it.