Rachel Kushner Quotes

Each character requires different language, and these issues become inseparable. You have all these balls in the air: language, character, narrative. For me, the primary focus must be words, sentences, paragraphs.

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.

I always loved watching movies because I loved what certain moments inside of films did to me.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

I'm always really impressed when a movie can function like a novel does - that's so hard to do.

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

European films were what it was about for me - the sensations I needed, the depth, the storytelling, the characters, the directors, and the freedom that you can't really find in American films.

In making films, I'm constantly looking for people who are in conflict and who are going to surprise you and challenge you.

It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with?

I like those kinds of songs that have details that you remember and that have stories that mean something and that open up into different levels philosophically. I like those kinds of movies, and I like those kinds of books.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

I just make films that attract me.

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.

Part of the responsibility of being a modern storyteller is understanding modern audiences and trusting what they can handle. It's not just settling into what we think they want.

In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.

'A Perfect Place' is character-driven. The director for that wanted a couple of identifiable themes with a bunch of variations. That is what I did. The director for 'The Solitude of Prime Numbers' did not want that at all.

I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction.

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.

I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

I think main storylines are what always intrigued me, with those that were the relationships between the characters against whatever backdrop, whether it was in an ordinary universe or a universe in the future.

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.