Rachel Kushner quotes

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

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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. (Rachel Kushner)

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?

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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. (Rachel Kushner)

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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