Rachel Kushner Quotes
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The art world is filled with vibrancy.
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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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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 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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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 don't like the info-dump, as it's known.
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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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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 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 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 have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.
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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 suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.
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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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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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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 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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Publishing is not my world.
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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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One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.
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My parents were hippies.
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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.