Rachel Kushner Quotes

Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn't making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I'd better do some writing.

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.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

In the '60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I'd written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies.

I went to UCLA for a year and a quarter. There were too many students at UCLA interested in what I was interested in, and they couldn't accommodate all of us. I wasn't allowed to take voice or dance, only theater and acting. So I saved my money and, at 19, moved to New York.

I went to college in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University... studied acting there. Then I went to New York for about five years. I moved out here about 10 years ago.

I keep threatening to write a non-fantasy book, and they keep offering me the kind of money I can't refuse to write a fantasy. That's a good thing. I have to pay my mortgage, and I have to pay for my Chargers season tickets.

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

I graduated with a B.A. from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College.

At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.

The truth of the matter is I stayed in L.A. raising my children, and when they went to college, I packed my bags along with them and came to New York and looked for parts in the theatre, because that's always what I preferred doing.

Originally, I think, I wanted to be an actor. But I got into broadcasting by accident, if you will, because I needed money to pay for my college education. I applied for a summer announcing job at a couple of radio stations.

When I turned fifty, I decided to quit the mill and go to graduate school.

My master's degree was in English literature.

I'm 19 now, and I go to The New School in New York, where I study Criminal Psychology. My first week of second semester was during Fashion Week when my first editorials in 'CR Fashion Book' and 'Sports Illustrated' came out. It was crazy!

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

In 1994, after four years of talking about travel on my first show, I realized I knew so little about the world - I knew so little about myself. I decided to quit my job and pursue a postgraduate degree in New York.

I didn't graduate. I was doing theater in Michigan the summer after my junior year and just moved on to New York.

I got a bad conduct discharge, was at home for a few months in late '99, and basically said, 'Dad, I want to give wrestling a shot. I sure as hell don't wanna go to college, and the Marine Corps wasn't for me. And I need to make some money, so let's see if I can do it.'

I got out of grad school in 2000. I was about 26 years old. I've always said that I was late to acting because I didn't really start doing it in a focused way until I was in my early 20s.

When I was about to enroll for my third year of college, I ended up dropping out and moving to Nashville.

I did engineering, and when people asked me my career plans, I used to say I would do an MBA.

I went to NYU to study liberal arts.