Rachel Kushner Quotes
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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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Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.
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Publishing is not my world.
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I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.
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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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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 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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One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
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I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.
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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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L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.
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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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It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.
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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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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 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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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 always collect images, maybe because I was working with historic material - but even if I were working with contemporary material, I would do the same thing. I keep a kind of index of them while I'm working. I find them incredibly useful, not so much to illustrate a time, but to give some sense of the feeling of a time.
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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.
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When I see someone for the first time in a while, and they ask, 'How have you been?' or 'What have you been up to?', it's politeness but a bit of a conversation stopper.
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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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Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.