Rachel Kushner Quotes

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

'The Rose Society' was definitely the hardest book I've ever written, because it's so difficult to stay in that dark space.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.