Rachel Cusk Quotes - Page 2

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.

You could time a suburban story by your watch: it lasts as long as it takes a small furry animal that's lonely to find friends, or a small furry animal that's lost to find its parents; it lasts as long as a quick avowal of love; it lasts precisely as long as the average parent is disposed on a Tuesday night to spend reading aloud to children.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

The British have always made terrible parents.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.