Rachel Kushner Quotes

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.

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. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

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

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

I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that.

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.

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.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

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 do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect.

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.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

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

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.

At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.

As to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.

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.

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

There is no single formula for good sentence. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times, the formula is almost purely one of context. And yet other times, of sheer precision of meaning. This is a good sentence: "Just as he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom, Shrike caught his arm." "Warm mud of alcoholic gloom" is exact and right and accurate.

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.

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.

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?

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.