Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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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I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there's something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.
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Proust is a huge author for me.
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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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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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The art world is filled with vibrancy.
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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 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 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 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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Publishing is not my world.
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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 know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.
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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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I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.
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L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.
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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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One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.
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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.
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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.
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One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
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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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I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.
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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.