Rachel Kushner Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A novel is not a rant.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The mind is off duty but the body is open.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Where people are gone the night falls upward, black and unmanned.

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

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.

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.

The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She's in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp over a log pile. The hollows of the curlers, spaces for hope: something good might happen.

There was no sign of Sandro. I watched the film to keep myself awake while I waited.

A man bought the woman a beer. She took dainty sips in her hair curlers, in preparation for no specific occasion. Curler time seemed almost religious, a waiting that was more important than what the waiting was for. Curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed.

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

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.

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.

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 don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

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 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?

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.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

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.

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

What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

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.

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.

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

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

...his ridiculousness was a form of vitality.

...it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.

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

At the end of Th Brother's K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child.

Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest.

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

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,

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering.

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

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

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

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.

Silent people can be misleading, suggesting profundity and thoughtfulness where there may be none.

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.

(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.")

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.