Rachel Kushner Quotes:

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.70, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Destiny, Want, Infatuated

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

Topics: Book, Character, Ideas

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

Topics: Want, Chatting

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.

Topics: Art, People, World

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.

Topics: Silence, Way, Silence Love

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

Topics: Mother, Impact, Profound

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.

Topics: Piano, Orchestra, Flutes, Cuban Music, Romantic Music

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

Topics: New York, Jobs, Writing

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.

Topics: Growing Up, Car, Motorcycle

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

Topics: New York, Writing, Editors

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

Topics: Character, People, Childhood

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

Topics: College, Young, Wanted, Precocious

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

Topics: Book, Character, Way, Misconception

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.

Topics: Flower, Writing, Home

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.

Topics: Knowing, Firsts, Narrators

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Topics: Fiction, Use, World

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.

Topics: Writing, Years, Crafts

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

Topics: Thinking, Touching, Want

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

Topics: Art, Play, Art Is

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

Topics: Art, Political, Opinion

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Children, Cutting, Years

You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.

Topics: Waiting, Use, Rough Times

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Love You, People, Challenges

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.179, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Men, Funny Things, Machines

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

Topics: Art, Soul, World

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.

Topics: Book, Writing, Numbers

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

Topics: People, Alive

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.383, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Moving, Next, Answers

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.

Topics: Believe, Want, Looks

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

Topics: Book, Writing, Men

In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.

Topics: Believe, Inspiration, Writing, Forthcoming, Quality Goods

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

Topics: People, Want, Easy

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Art, Logic

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Cracks, Life Is

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Real, Moral High Ground, Claims, High Ground

I think art is much more about an engagement with the world, a way of being called upon and recognizing that the world is speaking to you. Which isn't quite solitude, even if you're alone when it happens.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Art, Thinking, Solitude

I love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's an essential ingredient to making, to art. Certainly on a practical level it is. But on the other hand, I think it's a myth that the creative inspiration is locked up inside the person and just needs a quiet space and the right "serious" brooding moment to get released.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Art, Inspiration, Thinking

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2013). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.379, Simon and Schuster

Topics: New York, Men, Cities

The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: Character, Thinking, People

There is no single formula for good sentence. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times, the formula is almost purely one of context. And yet other times, of sheer precision of meaning. This is a good sentence: "Just as he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom, Shrike caught his arm." "Warm mud of alcoholic gloom" is exact and right and accurate.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Giving, Sometimes, Invisible

I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Responsibility

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.162, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Dream, Mistake, People

I like to think each writer is doing his or her part. Feeding the lake, as Jean Rhys said. And maybe there are different lakes.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Thinking, Different

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Book, Writing, Men, Artistry

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: People, Narrative, Myth

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: People, Complicated

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Art, Risk, World, Vanguard

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Children, War, Reality

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.

Topics: Book, Reading, Home, Floats

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Believe, Outcomes, Chaos

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Writing, Trying, Fiction

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Toss, Authenticity, Photograph

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Real, Ideas, World

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Female

I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Fun, Thinking, Quality

I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Mean, Thinking, Risk

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Thinking, Agency, Motorcycle

There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Real, Motorcycle, Appeals

I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Art, Risk, Realms

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Book, Ideas, Fiction

The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Growing Up, Kids, Smell

As to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Real, Lying, Believe

I was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: Children, Character, Artist

At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: People, Age

It's unfortunately true that if you mess up a single detail of the art world the whole thing seems false, and most writers are not in a position to get the details right, because they don't hang around with artists. It's not something you can get the vague gist of. It's too specific.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: Art, Artist, World

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Hard Work, Writing, Never Quit

I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Character, Understanding, Helping

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: Art, Community, World

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Artist, Thinking, Morris

I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Pain, Thinking

While it might be true that our reality would suggest that more writers would address these elemental issues of modern life - work, the marketplace, brutality, race - I'm not sure I have enough of a sense in aggregate of what the dominant novelists are doing to comment on why less do, or if less do. Maybe that's partly because I don't feel woven into any kind of fabric of contemporaries; I just read what I read, and do what I do.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Reality, Kind, Modern

I do not enjoy the promotional side of being a writer, to be blunt about it. Even with the little amount that is expected of me, which is nothing compared to the life of an artist. Writers can live in obscurity and come out of the woodwork with a book, then go back in. Artists don’t have that luxury.

source: - "Rachel Kushner: The Useless Truth". Interview with Jonathan Lee, www.guernicamag.com. February 17, 2014.

Topics: Book, Writing, Artist

The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2013). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.61, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Dream, Thinking, Make You Think

The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.

source: - Rachel Kushner (2014). “The Flamethrowers: A Novel”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Love Is, Desire, Want