Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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.
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I don't write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it's possibly no different from saying you don't eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you're at the keyboard.
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I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.
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Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.
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My older brother, Jake, and I had a bohemian childhood. My parents are deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation. They weren't married, and I thought that was normal. We called them by their first names.
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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.
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Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.
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Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.
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I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.
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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.
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'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.
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I don't think of myself as a gearhead or a motorcyclist. I'm not that young, and this is like another life of mine. But the people I know from that era think of me that way.
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I write the novels that are possible for me to write, not that ones I think will come across in a certain light.
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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.
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I spent ten years riding motorcycles.
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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.
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My neighbors think I do nothing because I don't go to a job, which is fine and good.
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A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.
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Prayer is so complicated.
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For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.
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I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.
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I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.
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I have never liked the 'Been there done that' thing... You hear that all the time from people, and I think it's just based on pure insecurity... Each person is going to have their own unique take on something.
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Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.