Rachel Kushner Quotes

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.

I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.

I don't think I'm any competition to the already-existing canon of writers in Kannada. How can I ever even think of comparing myself?

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

My only claim to fame, if I have one, is that I'm an editor.

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to judge the Man Booker if it weren't for 'Downton.'

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.