Rachel Kushner Quotes

The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive.

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.

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.

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.

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.

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

While it might be true that our reality would suggest that more writers would address these elemental issues of modern life - work, the marketplace, brutality, race - I'm not sure I have enough of a sense in aggregate of what the dominant novelists are doing to comment on why less do, or if less do. Maybe that's partly because I don't feel woven into any kind of fabric of contemporaries; I just read what I read, and do what I do.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. 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.

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.

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.

It's unfortunately true that if you mess up a single detail of the art world the whole thing seems false, and most writers are not in a position to get the details right, because they don't hang around with artists. It's not something you can get the vague gist of. It's too specific.

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.

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.

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.

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

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.

I love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's an essential ingredient to making, to art. Certainly on a practical level it is. But on the other hand, I think it's a myth that the creative inspiration is locked up inside the person and just needs a quiet space and the right "serious" brooding moment to get released.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.

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.

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

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

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

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

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

I think art is much more about an engagement with the world, a way of being called upon and recognizing that the world is speaking to you. Which isn't quite solitude, even if you're alone when it happens.

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

I was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult.

You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not. But, from writing about art, I had met some artists in L.A. They said, "Why don't you try living out here?" So I traded apartments with the painter Delia Brown. That was in 2003. I loved it. I still love living there.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.