Rachel Kushner Quotes

#1. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#2. I don't really see art as structured by logic.

Rachel Kushner

#3. L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

Rachel Kushner

#4. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#5. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#6. 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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#11. Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Rachel Kushner

#12. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#13. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#14. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#15. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#16. I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#18. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#19. 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

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

Rachel Kushner

#21. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

Rachel Kushner

#22. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#23. In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#25. I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

Rachel Kushner

#26. The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.

Rachel Kushner

#27. 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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#29. To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,

Rachel Kushner

#30. People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.

Rachel Kushner

#31. The thing suppressed as an intrusion," Eric said, "is almost always worth looking at.

Rachel Kushner

#32. A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

Rachel Kushner

#33. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#34. In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

Rachel Kushner

#35. 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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#37. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#38. 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

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

Rachel Kushner

#40. When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Rachel Kushner

#41. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#42. I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

Rachel Kushner

#43. 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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#45. I have never liked the 'Been there done that' thing ... You hear that all the time from people, and I think it's just based on pure insecurity ... Each person is going to have their own unique take on something.

Rachel Kushner

#46. I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#53. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#54. A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

Rachel Kushner

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#60. I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

Rachel Kushner

#61. 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

#62. Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer.

Rachel Kushner

#63. 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

#64. 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

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

Rachel Kushner

#66. Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.

Rachel Kushner

#67. Proust is a huge author for me.

Rachel Kushner

#68. 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

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#71. 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

#72. Publishing is not my world.

Rachel Kushner

#73. 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

#74. My older brother, Jake, and I had a bohemian childhood. My parents are deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation. They weren't married, and I thought that was normal. We called them by their first names.

Rachel Kushner

#75. I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

Rachel Kushner

#76. I don't think a woman riding a motorcycle thinks of herself as doing something that has sex appeal. I think she's trying to replicate for herself an experience that she sees men having.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#78. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#79. 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

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

Rachel Kushner

#81. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#82. All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#84. I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

Rachel Kushner

#85. The art world is filled with vibrancy.

Rachel Kushner

#86. 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.

Rachel Kushner

#87. I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

Rachel Kushner

#88. I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

Rachel Kushner

#89. A novel is not a rant.

Rachel Kushner

#90. 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

#91. My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era ... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.

Rachel Kushner

#92. I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

#94. Eventually, I grew out of my interest in motorcycles because they're quite dangerous. I don't ride them anymore. But I have this history.

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#95. I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

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#96. 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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#97. 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

#98. I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

Rachel Kushner

#99. 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

#100. 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