Quotes from Rachel Kushner

When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

Prayer is so complicated.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.

It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I'm a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they're mine, so who cares.

From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized.

I don't write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it's possibly no different from saying you don't eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you're at the keyboard.

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.

Publishing is not my world.

I have never liked the 'Been there done that' thing... You hear that all the time from people, and I think it's just based on pure insecurity... Each person is going to have their own unique take on something.

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.