Rachel Kushner Quotes

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

For the most part, romance is written in third person, and it's written in multiple points of view, so you're in the hero's head, and you're in the heroine's head. I've always said that I'm more of a narrator than a creator.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

Real people are never central characters in my works.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

I think characters are going to be, if not a reflection of the author, at least some refraction of some part of their personality.

Whenever I approach any character, I try to find examples to draw upon.

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.

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.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.