Rachel Kushner Quotes

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

It's good for a story to have a strong style.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

My first attempt at writing was very unstructured and formless, with shifting points of view. I was trying to understand how long form might work, and I realized I had something shapeless. It was a total car wreck. But I still felt I could pull it off. So I ditched that attempt and started writing in the opposite manner, in first person, with a driving narrative.

I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.

That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

I come at it from a different angle of attack with each novel, searching for the technological texture the story demands. There isn't a recipe; it's more of an instinct.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

For me, everything about the telling is guided by tone. It's a bit mysterious; it's either there, or it isn't.

I've been guilty of being in the writers' room and going too dark; other people have gone too wacky and zany.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.