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 have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.
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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 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 love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.
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I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.
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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 believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others.
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I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.
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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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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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I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.
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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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Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.
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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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The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.
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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 am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.
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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.
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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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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.