Rachel Kushner Quotes

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

I certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

I know what it's like to be genuinely intrigued and compelled by a story and to have a sense that there's an adventure to be had and a film to be conjured.

When I set out to write, I see it very visually. I almost feel like a reporter. I'm relating what I'm seeing and hearing, so it's kind of watching a play for me.

The more ways you can tell a story and paint a picture, the better it is.

When you're trying to create imagery, you're trying to create a feeling or a mood.

No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

There are times my stories become - what I feel - not only accessible to hearing me on television, but they make wonderful reading.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.