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These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.
Rachel Kushner -
There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened.
Rachel Kushner
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I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.
Rachel Kushner -
One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner
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I don't like the info-dump, as it's known.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
Proust is a huge author for me.
Rachel Kushner -
I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner
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I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated.
Rachel Kushner -
Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.
Rachel Kushner -
I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
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.
Rachel Kushner -
Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.
Rachel Kushner
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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.
Rachel Kushner -
My parents were hippies.
Rachel Kushner -
I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.
Rachel Kushner -
Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.
Rachel Kushner