Rachel Kushner quotes - page 2

I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write. (Rachel Kushner)

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment.

Rachel Kushner

Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

I think that when the social stakes for people are higher, how you present yourself may sometimes feel like it's going to inform your destiny. Because if other people regard you in a certain way, they'll want to help you, and you will end up having a career.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and I wanted to dream a phantom link from the early futurists to the politically radical Italy of the 1970s, a time of fun, play, subversion - if also violence and mayhem. (Rachel Kushner)

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

Rachel Kushner

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

Eventually, I grew out of my interest in motorcycles because they're quite dangerous. I don't ride them anymore. But I have this history.

Rachel Kushner

For me, everything about the telling is guided by tone. It's a bit mysterious; it's either there, or it isn't. (Rachel Kushner)

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Rachel Kushner

I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.

Rachel Kushner

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