Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.
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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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I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.
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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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Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.
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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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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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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.
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I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.
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I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
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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.
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From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized.
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I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.
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I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.
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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.
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I don't believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others.
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I'm hesitant to ever take on the crest of the veteran. So I don't know who I am to warn the younger writer about the perils to come. I think maybe the most dangerous influence is to think you have all the answers and should be giving counsel.
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I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing.
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I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.
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When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.