Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

“...his ridiculousness was a form of vitality.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

Art breathes into life a surplus that is both vital and extraordinary.

— Rachel Kushner

“Because I didn't move here to fall in love. The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy…

— Rachel Kushner

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For…

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

“Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious…

— Rachel Kushner

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are…

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't…

— Rachel Kushner

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write…

— Rachel Kushner

“But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It…

— Rachel Kushner

I think art is much more about an engagement with the world, a way of being called upon and recognizing that the…

— Rachel Kushner

“I was a kid. I didn't know about love, that you see someone and whether or not they say much, they make…

— Rachel Kushner

“What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden,…

— Rachel Kushner

“I remember a rainbow spectrum of men’s wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and…

— Rachel Kushner

“What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I…

— Rachel Kushner

Artists are political in the sense that they've subtracted themselves from the structure of the marketplace and are contributing something that's not…

— Rachel Kushner

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by…

— Rachel Kushner

“Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what…

— Rachel Kushner

“The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She's in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp…

— Rachel Kushner

There is no single formula for good sentence. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times,…

— Rachel Kushner

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to…

— Rachel Kushner

“Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don’t…

— Rachel Kushner

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You…

— Rachel Kushner

“A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity.…

— Rachel Kushner

I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain…

— Rachel Kushner

“When I was twelve, Flip came through Reno and gave out autographs at a casino. I didn't have a glossy photo for…

— Rachel Kushner

“We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your…

— Rachel Kushner

“We talked about the speed trials, which were starting today. I said I was running in them, but not that it was…

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

“She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together.”

— Rachel Kushner