Rachel Kushner Quotes

I am a big devourer of James Baldwin.

I'm a big Hemingway and Salinger fan.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I'm a big fan of Michael Morpurgo.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

I adore Toni Morrison. I think we would all be better writers if we read more of her.

One of my favorite authors is Michael Ondaatje.

We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

Michael Harvey should be read by all.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.