238 Quotes by Rachel Kushner

  • Author Rachel Kushner
  • Quote

    Certain women in jail and prison make rules for everyone else, and the woman insisting on quiet was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    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.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    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.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    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.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    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 toolshed, a friend’s father trying to lure you into his car. They don’t lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    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.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    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.

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  • Author Rachel Kushner
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    It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it at the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

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