Top 90 Rachel Kushner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I’m happy that way.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

3. “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

4. “Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly’s feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn’t have both.”

— Rachel Kushner

5. “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.”

— Rachel Kushner

6. “The mind is off duty but the body is open.”

— Rachel Kushner

7. “It’s hard to live on the streets. In prison, you can be someone. Life has order if you know how to do time, and I know. I’m an expert. Living in a tent is a temporary thing. You do it until you go back to prison. That’s just how it works.”

— Rachel Kushner

8. “I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.”

— Rachel Kushner

9. “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

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

— Rachel Kushner

11. “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

12. “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

13. “We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

15. “I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.”

— Rachel Kushner

16. “A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was OK to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.”

— Rachel Kushner

17. “A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

20. “People are complicated. Personally I don’t go in for puritanical people.”

— Rachel Kushner

21. “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

22. “The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

25. “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

26. “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

27. “No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.”

— Rachel Kushner

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t?”

— Rachel Kushner

37. “People who want their love easy don’t really want love.”

— Rachel Kushner

38. “I don’t regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

40. “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

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

— Rachel Kushner

42. “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

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

— Rachel Kushner

44. “Motorcycles aren’t about gaining agency, I don’t think.”

— Rachel Kushner

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

— Rachel Kushner

46. “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

47. “To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That’s how you learn something.”

— Rachel Kushner

48. “I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it.”

— Rachel Kushner

49. “We should torture language to tell the truth.”

— Rachel Kushner

50. “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