Top 189 Quotes & Sayings by Rachel Kushner

It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of homophobia. Homosexuals have been notoriously persecuted under Fidel's government.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.

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

One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.

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.

The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.

Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.

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

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

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.

The interaction between the two matters, but to me, each doesn't really exist independently of the other, so I'm not ever faced with a situation where the tone is wrong for the story, or the story wrong for the tone. They are two parts of one thing.

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.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

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'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.

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

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.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

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 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.

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

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

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

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

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.

Prayer is so complicated.

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

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.

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

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

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

A novel is not a rant.

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

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.

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can't find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else.

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.

For me, everything about the telling is guided by tone. It's a bit mysterious; it's either there, or it isn't.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

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

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment.

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.

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.

L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

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.

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.

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.

It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

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

My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.