Rachel Kushner

“When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.”

“One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.”

“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.”

“Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.”

“Art breathes into life a surplus that is both vital and extraordinary.”

“I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.”

“Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.”

“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.”

“Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.”

“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.”

“Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.”

“I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.'”

“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.”

“I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.”

“My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.”

“I'm a kind person; I don't have a really nihilist streak in me, but I respond to that kind of humour.”