Rachel Kushner Quotes

I think working with artists is incredibly important for everybody in the world, but also, it is a way of seeing the world differently.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Making art is different for everyone.

Many people say to me, particularly about my dance writing, 'It sounds just like you.' But it sounds just like me after I've made it sound like me.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it's how it can bend.

Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

One can't help but bring one's own personality into what one is doing, and it's certainly true of us actors and it's true of writers.

People should be free to take whatever they want from music and I think that over time I realized that different people always find different things in my songs, which is really good.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

Even if it's such a lowly art as TV, you've got to get stuff off your chest, because that's what makes something different and original, your particular take on stuff.

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

I'm not a guy who likes cliches. I don't think that stereotypes and cliches are the end of the line, when it comes to a performance.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.