Quotes from Rachel Kushner

I'm a kind person; I don't have a really nihilist streak in me, but I respond to that kind of humour.

I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened.

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing.

Proust is a huge author for me.

I don't think of myself as a gearhead or a motorcyclist. I'm not that young, and this is like another life of mine. But the people I know from that era think of me that way.

Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and I wanted to dream a phantom link from the early futurists to the politically radical Italy of the 1970s, a time of fun, play, subversion - if also violence and mayhem.