Rachel Kushner

I__ been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That__ what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn__ say much, I listened.

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

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.

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

Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it.

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.

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.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.

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.

Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

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.

The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing.

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can't find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

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.

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.