Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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 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 love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.
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Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.
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I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.
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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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The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.
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I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.
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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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Publishing is not my world.
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I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.
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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 have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.
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I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.
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Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.
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I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.
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It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.
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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.
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In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.
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The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.
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I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.
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Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side.
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I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.
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When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.