Rachel Kushner Quotes

#1. A novel is not a rant.

Rachel Kushner

#2. It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of homophobia. Homosexuals have been notoriously persecuted under Fidel's government.

Rachel Kushner

#3. Publishing is not my world.

Rachel Kushner

#4. She always had that empty look ... It's a particular blankness, and I've mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen's clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some "gentleman's" fantasy.

Rachel Kushner

#5. 'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

Rachel Kushner

#6. Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

Rachel Kushner

#7. I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Rachel Kushner

#8. There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

Rachel Kushner

#9. The VW doesn't make you think of Hitler and genocide. It's a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

Rachel Kushner

#10. Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

Rachel Kushner

#11. Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Rachel Kushner

#12. Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

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#13. The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

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#14. The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.

Rachel Kushner

#15. But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.

Rachel Kushner

#16. Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.

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#17. A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

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#18. Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Rachel Kushner

#19. Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

Rachel Kushner

#20. Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

Rachel Kushner

#21. I'm hesitant to ever take on the crest of the veteran. So I don't know who I am to warn the younger writer about the perils to come. I think maybe the most dangerous influence is to think you have all the answers and should be giving counsel.

Rachel Kushner

#22. There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened.

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#23. Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

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#24. What had actually been in Valera's haversack: not a woman's vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.

Rachel Kushner

#25. I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.

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#26. Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

Rachel Kushner

#27. I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

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#28. Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.

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#29. I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

Rachel Kushner

#30. I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

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#31. Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.

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#32. People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

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#33. For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

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#34. The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.

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#35. Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

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#36. Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and I wanted to dream a phantom link from the early futurists to the politically radical Italy of the 1970s, a time of fun, play, subversion - if also violence and mayhem.

Rachel Kushner

#37. I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated.

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#38. For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.

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#39. When I see someone for the first time in a while, and they ask, 'How have you been?' or 'What have you been up to?', it's politeness but a bit of a conversation stopper.

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#40. 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.

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#41. I'd been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That's what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn't say much, I listened.

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#42. They were accustomed to being interrupted. Whoever was hungriest to speak, spoke. I wasn't hungry in that same way. I was hungry to listen.

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#43. I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

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#44. I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.

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#45. I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.'

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#46. I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

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#47. Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don't. It can't be reduced to money. I can't explain why I do it. It's a kind of impulse.

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#48. I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.

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#49. I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

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#50. The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy of respect. It's not admirable to want love, it just is.

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#51. Sandro never cared about reciprocity. Sex is not about exchange values, he said. It's a gift economy.

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#52. It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.

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#53. One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.

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#54. The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

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#55. I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

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#56. I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.

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#57. Happiness is a mysterious concept. It seems to work best as futurity: at that point I will be happy, et cetera. I feel like I experience small pieces of joy day to day.

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#58. It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

Rachel Kushner

#59. The interaction between the two matters, but to me, each doesn't really exist independently of the other, so I'm not ever faced with a situation where the tone is wrong for the story, or the story wrong for the tone. They are two parts of one thing.

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#60. She was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time.

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#61. Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

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#62. I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

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#63. To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

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#64. I don't think of myself as a gearhead or a motorcyclist. I'm not that young, and this is like another life of mine. But the people I know from that era think of me that way.

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#65. It was just one night of drinking and chance. I'd known it at the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it.

Rachel Kushner

#66. I was a kid. I didn't know about love, that you see someone and whether or not they say much, they make the world suddenly different, a mysterious and more alive place that you can access only through them. And the new, better world falls lifeless and flat when they go away.

Rachel Kushner

#67. I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing.

Rachel Kushner

#68. (Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.")

Rachel Kushner

#69. I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there's something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.

Rachel Kushner

#70. In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.

Rachel Kushner

#71. I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.

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#72. One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

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#73. She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together.

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#74. When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.

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#75. Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

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#76. Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it.

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#77. I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

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#78. I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

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#79. From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized.

Rachel Kushner

#80. At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I'm a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they're mine, so who cares.

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#81. Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.

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#82. I don't know if it's revolutionary not to work," she had told me, "but it's better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You're yourself and you get paid for it," or so she had thought at the time,

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#83. Prayer is so complicated.

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#84. Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

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#85. I'm not the kind of person who would want to go into a studio and manage other people and listen to the phone ringing. That's alien to me.

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#86. I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

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#87. I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

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#88. Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

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#89. Whatever she was or wasn't, she looked like a liar and he liked liars.

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#90. Success is a completely abstract thing - it has no bearing on daily life, family matters, the matter of artistic creation, but it can affect grace, and if I lose that, I really have gained nothing from success.

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#91. I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

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#92. Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win.

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#93. I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

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#94. Isn't that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don't?

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#95. I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

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

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#97. My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary, London Review of Books, January 14, 2015].

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#98. Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

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#99. I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.

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#100. Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.

Rachel Kushner