Quotes from Rachel Kushner

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.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

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

We're all performing for someone.

Success is a completely abstract thing - it has no bearing on daily life, family matters, the matter of artistic creation, but it can affect grace, and if I lose that, I really have gained nothing from success.

I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainier and the incredible Lynda Benglis. There were many women who were really driven and became successful, who were part of essential paradigm shifts, despite the fact that the art world was still dominated by men.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.

Happiness is a mysterious concept. It seems to work best as futurity: at that point I will be happy, et cetera. I feel like I experience small pieces of joy day to day.

I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.

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.

I'm hesitant to ever take on the crest of the veteran. So I don't know who I am to warn the younger writer about the perils to come. I think maybe the most dangerous influence is to think you have all the answers and should be giving counsel.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.

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

A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.

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.

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.

A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was OK to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.

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.

The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won't ever hear anyone describe a man's appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn't have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.

Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.

To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,