Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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 guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
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The art world is filled with vibrancy.
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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.
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My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.
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If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.
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Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.
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The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects.
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I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.
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I don't like the info-dump, as it's known.
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I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.
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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.
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I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.
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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.
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I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainier and the incredible Lynda Benglis. There were many women who were really driven and became successful, who were part of essential paradigm shifts, despite the fact that the art world was still dominated by men.
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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 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 got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.
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I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.
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I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.
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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.
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My parents were hippies.
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Publishing is not my world.
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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.