Rachel Kushner quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rachel Kushner on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Publishing is not my world.

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.

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

For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.

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

She was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time.

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.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

Sandro never cared about reciprocity. Sex is not about exchange values, he said. It's a gift economy.

A novel is not a rant.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

Whatever she was or wasn't, she looked like a liar and he liked liars.

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

Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don't. It can't be reduced to money. I can't explain why I do it. It's a kind of impulse.

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

Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely.

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

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.'

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

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.

She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together.

Prayer is so complicated.

I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.

...his ridiculousness was a form of vitality.

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

What had actually been in Valera's haversack: not a woman's vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.

I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.

To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,

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

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

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

I'm a kind person; I don't have a really nihilist streak in me, but I respond to that kind of humour.

From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized.

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

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

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

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

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

I'm not the kind of person who would want to go into a studio and manage other people and listen to the phone ringing. That's alien to me.

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

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

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.

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 have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.

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

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 had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, 'Telex From Cuba,' I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.

It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.

I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.

They were accustomed to being interrupted. Whoever was hungriest to speak, spoke. I wasn't hungry in that same way. I was hungry to listen.

The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

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

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

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.

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.

Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

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

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

I don't like the info-dump, as it's known.

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

The thing suppressed as an intrusion," Eric said, "is almost always worth looking at.

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

The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.

Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

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

Proust is a huge author for me.

My neighbors think I do nothing because I don't go to a job, which is fine and good.

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.

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

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

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

One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.

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

We're all performing for someone.

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

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

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

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

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