Quotes from Rachel Kushner

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

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.

Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.

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.

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?

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

I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there's something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.

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.

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side.

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.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse. The art world is filled with vibrancy.

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.

Eventually, I grew out of my interest in motorcycles because they're quite dangerous. I don't ride them anymore. But I have this history.