Rachel Kushner quotes:

My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary, London Review of Books, January 14, 2015].

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.

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.

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 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."

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

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

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

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

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

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.

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it's a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don't find you and your dream utterly revolting.

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.

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.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

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

I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

I do not enjoy the promotional side of being a writer, to be blunt about it. Even with the little amount that is expected of me, which is nothing compared to the life of an artist. Writers can live in obscurity and come out of the woodwork with a book, then go back in. Artists don't have that luxury.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

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.

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

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

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

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.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

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.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.

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.

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy of respect. It's not admirable to want love, it just is.

The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.

The VW doesn't make you think of Hitler and genocide. It's a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

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.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.

You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.