In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don’t want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
I don’t believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
I’m not the kind of person who would want to go into a studio and manage other people and listen to the phone ringing. That’s alien to me. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainier and the incredible Lynda Benglis. There were many women who were really driven and became successful, who were part of essential paradigm shifts, despite the fact that the art world was still dominated by men. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
I’m drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don’t understand, where there are things you can’t access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school. Rachel Kushner Read Quote
