Top 55 Rachel Kushner Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, ‘Telex From Cuba,’ I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.

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.

I don’t read for plot, a story ‘about’ this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

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

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

I don’t like the info-dump, as it’s known.

I’m a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I’m happy that way.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from ‘Mad Magazine.’ But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader’s added knowledge.

Publishing is not my world.

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.

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.

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.

I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours’ sleep to work.

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.

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.

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as ‘sweeping,’_ ‘tender’ or ‘universal.’ But to the real question of what’s inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don’t read for plot, a story ‘about’ this or that.

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

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. The art world is filled with vibrancy.

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.

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.

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

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

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

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

My neighbors think I do nothing because I don’t go to a job, which is fine and good.

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.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

My parents were hippies.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. ‘Ingrid Caven,’ by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read ‘Morvern Callar,’ by Alan Warner, every year – I adored that book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment.

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.

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.

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.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

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

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.