Rachel Kushner Quotes

College is something you complete. Life is something you experience.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

I wasn't a very good student. I prefer to learn by experience.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

Everything I experience influences everything I do.

I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.

The only real inspiration or muse that I have is just the life that I live.

I have a formal education, but there's a whole lot you don't learn in school. And you only have so much time to figure it out. No matter how cerebral, celestial, how ethnic, there's a span of time here.

I didn't go to uni and although I don't have regrets in my life, I have two nephews and I'd encourage them to go to uni as I don't think you need to grow up too quick.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

As you get old, you live and learn.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

If you are a good writer you use your life experience to do something different than someone who is 20-years-old can do. That is where you get your power. That is our power as a group. I am not trying to make the same music I made 10 years ago.

I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.

Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself.

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

I look like this because I'm alive," Reagan said. "Because I've had experiences. Do you understand?

Wisdom is not to be obtained from textbooks, but must be coined out of human experience in the flame of life.

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

Half my life is in book's written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages.

I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.

Education is cheap; experience is expensive.