Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the…

— Rachel Kushner

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like…

— Rachel Kushner

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in…

— Rachel Kushner

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all…

— Rachel Kushner

“A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with…

— Rachel Kushner

“La Mazière had met with El Extraño at a chicken-dinner-and-cockfight joint near the Havana airport, a place that proved even more vulgar…

— Rachel Kushner

I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the…

— 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

“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

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 love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's…

— Rachel Kushner

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are…

— Rachel Kushner

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none…

— Rachel Kushner

“[T]ime is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling…

— Rachel Kushner

“But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women.…

— Rachel Kushner

“Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don’t. It can’t be reduced to money. I can’t explain why I do…

— Rachel Kushner

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…

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

“We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast.”

— Rachel Kushner

“The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear…

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a…

— Rachel Kushner

I write the novels that are possible for me to write, not that ones I think will come across in a certain…

— Rachel Kushner

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as…

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we…

— Rachel Kushner

In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have…

— Rachel Kushner

You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not. But, from writing…

— Rachel Kushner

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is…

— Rachel Kushner

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is…

— Rachel Kushner

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath,…

— Rachel Kushner

“There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas…

— Rachel Kushner

“Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by…

— Rachel Kushner

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century.…

— Rachel Kushner

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the…

— Rachel Kushner

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while…

— Rachel Kushner