When I see someone for the first time in a while, and they ask, ‘How have you been?’ or ‘What have you been up to?’, it’s politeness but a bit of a conversation stopper. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she’s qualified to write about a certain topic. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, ‘Telex From Cuba,’ I made an elaborate website that is basically all images. – Rachel Kushner
I think that when the social stakes for people are higher, how you present yourself may sometimes feel like it’s going to inform your destiny. Because if other people regard you in a certain way, they’ll want to help you, and you will end up having a career. – Rachel Kushner
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. – 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. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I’m interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak. – 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. – Rachel Kushner
Painting was a problem – you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
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. – Rachel Kushner
I don’t believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences. – 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 the art world is done wrong, a reader’s faith is lost and possibly not recuperable. – Rachel Kushner
I always collect images, maybe because I was working with historic material – but even if I were working with contemporary material, I would do the same thing. I keep a kind of index of them while I’m working. I find them incredibly useful, not so much to illustrate a time, but to give some sense of the feeling of a time. – 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 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. – Rachel Kushner
I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly. – Rachel Kushner
