Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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 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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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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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'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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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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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.
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Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.
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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 grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.
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I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.
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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 have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.
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The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.
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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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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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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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It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.
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Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.
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Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.
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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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I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.
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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.