Rachel Kushner Quotes & Sayings

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

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

Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don't care about the actual news, just that the radio is issuing a steadyish sound whose particulars they do not have to follow to understand what the radio is actually telling them: life is being lived. No need to be a part of it as long as you know it's streaming. — Rachel Kushner

There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend's father trying to lure you into his car. They don't lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you. — Rachel Kushner

She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together. — Rachel Kushner

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image. — Rachel Kushner

She was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time. — Rachel Kushner

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can't find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else. — Rachel Kushner

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable. — Rachel Kushner

I think that when the social stakes for people are higher, how you present yourself may sometimes feel like it's going to inform your destiny. Because if other people regard you in a certain way, they'll want to help you, and you will end up having a career. — Rachel Kushner

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences. — Rachel Kushner

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding. — Rachel Kushner

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I'd seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it's a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don't find you and your dream utterly revolting. — Rachel Kushner

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely. — Rachel Kushner

One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic. — Rachel Kushner

Prayer is so complicated. — Rachel Kushner

The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects. — Rachel Kushner

[T]ime is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness. — Rachel Kushner

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

A novel is not a rant. — Rachel Kushner

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with. — Rachel Kushner

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way. — Rachel Kushner

Whatever she was or wasn't, she looked like a liar and he liked liars. — Rachel Kushner

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

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]. — Rachel Kushner

Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side. — Rachel Kushner

I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work. — Rachel Kushner

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

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

She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely. — Rachel Kushner

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

To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you, — Rachel Kushner

I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you. — Rachel Kushner

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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, — Rachel Kushner

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

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly. — Rachel Kushner

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? — Rachel Kushner

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

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

I don't really see art as structured by logic. — Rachel Kushner

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

I'm a kind person; I don't have a really nihilist streak in me, but I respond to that kind of humour. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

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

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

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me. — Rachel Kushner

Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly's feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn't have both. — Rachel Kushner

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

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. — Rachel Kushner

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs! — Rachel Kushner

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

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak. — Rachel Kushner

Publishing is not my world. — Rachel Kushner

I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics. — Rachel Kushner

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

...his ridiculousness was a form of vitality. — Rachel Kushner

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

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something. — Rachel Kushner

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

I do not enjoy the promotional side of being a writer, to be blunt about it. Even with the little amount that is expected of me, which is nothing compared to the life of an artist. Writers can live in obscurity and come out of the woodwork with a book, then go back in. Artists don't have that luxury. — Rachel Kushner

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was OK to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad. — Rachel Kushner

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks. — Rachel Kushner

I always collect images, maybe because I was working with historic material - but even if I were working with contemporary material, I would do the same thing. I keep a kind of index of them while I'm working. I find them incredibly useful, not so much to illustrate a time, but to give some sense of the feeling of a time. — Rachel Kushner

We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal "me." I wasn't so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood. — Rachel Kushner

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

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

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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

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