Rachel Kushner Quotes
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.
To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
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.
I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.
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.
The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.
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.
Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
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.
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.
I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.
I like to think each writer is doing his or her part. Feeding the lake, as Jean Rhys said. And maybe there are different lakes.
My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.
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.
I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.
I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.
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.
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.
My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.
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.
I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
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.
I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.
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'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.