61+ Rachel Kushner Quotes On Religion, Education And Socialism

Rachel Kushner is an American novelist and essayist. She is best known for her novels The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Rachel Kushner on religion, life, education.

Top 10 Rachel Kushner Quotes

1. I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.
2. I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.
3. People who want their love easy don't really want love.
4. A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.
5. At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.
6. My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.
7. Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.
8. People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.
9. The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.
10. I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

Rachel Kushner Short Quotes

• I don't really see art as structured by logic.
• For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.
• I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.
• Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.
• I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.
• A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.
• People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.
• Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
• To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
• It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

Rachel Kushner Quotes About Love

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner Quotes About A Motorcycle

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

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think. — 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 adult, in cars and on motorcycles. — Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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

The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — 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

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

It's unfortunately true that if you mess up a single detail of the art world the whole thing seems false, and most writers are not in a position to get the details right, because they don't hang around with artists. It's not something you can get the vague gist of. It's too specific. — Rachel Kushner

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. — 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

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. — 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

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. — 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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel. — Rachel Kushner

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

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. — Rachel Kushner

I was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult. — Rachel Kushner

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. — 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’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

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. — Rachel Kushner

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not. But, from writing about art, I had met some artists in L.A. They said, "Why don't you try living out here?" So I traded apartments with the painter Delia Brown. That was in 2003. I loved it. I still love living there. — Rachel Kushner

Life Lessons by Rachel Kushner

1. Rachel Kushner's work emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the details of everyday life and the power of storytelling to connect us to the past.
2. Her writing also highlights the need to challenge existing systems and structures of power in order to create a more just and equitable society.
3. Finally, her work demonstrates the value of empathy and understanding in order to create meaningful change.