Quotes by Rachel Kushner

About Rachel Kushner:

Rachel Kushner is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008) and The Flamethrowers (2013).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.

Rachel Kushner

There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a to...

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills d...

Rachel Kushner

What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

Rachel Kushner

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

Rachel Kushner

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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.

Rachel Kushner

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...

Rachel Kushner

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 adul...

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

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

Rachel Kushner

Author Bio

  • NameRachel Kushner
  • Descriptionwriter from the United States
  • Born1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America