Rachel Kushner Quotes

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.

Rachel Kushner

• World
• Great
• Culture

Publishing is not my world.

Rachel Kushner

• World
• Publishing

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.

Rachel Kushner

• Mind
• Growing
• Landscape

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

Rachel Kushner

• People
• Respect
• Gifted

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

Rachel Kushner

• Time
• Alone
• Myself

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

Rachel Kushner

• Write
• Writers
• Novels

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

Rachel Kushner

• Trying
• Always
• Tone

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

Rachel Kushner

• People
• Compassion
• Ugly

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

Rachel Kushner

• Up
• Growing
• Growing Up

I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.

Rachel Kushner

• Life
• Work
• Sleep

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.

Rachel Kushner

• Kind
• Language
• Story

I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.

Rachel Kushner

• Up
• New
• New York

I don't believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others.

Rachel Kushner

• Work
• Model
• Inspiration

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.

Rachel Kushner

• Great
• Real
• Space

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.

Rachel Kushner

• World
• Art
• Character

Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.

Rachel Kushner

• Like
• Place
• Italy

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.

Rachel Kushner

• Up
• Long
• History

It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.

Rachel Kushner

• World
• Meaning
• Engagement

Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side.

Rachel Kushner

• Up
• Art
• Truth

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

Rachel Kushner

• Phony
• Descriptions
• Lengthy

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

Rachel Kushner

• People
• Work
• Trying

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse. The art world is filled with vibrancy.

Rachel Kushner

• People
• World
• Art

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.

Rachel Kushner

• Things
• Write
• Novel

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

Rachel Kushner

• Know
• Like
• Motorcycle