Rachel Cusk Quotes:

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

Topics: Mother, Littles, Might

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

Topics: Thinking, Artist, Want

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

Topics: Motherhood, Feelings, Being A Mother, Hacks

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.

Topics: Art, Writing, Reality, Truth And Reality

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

source: - "I was only being honest" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. Match 21, 2008.

Topics: Writing, Average, Skins, Thickness

The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

Topics: Writing, Needs, Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

Topics: Mother, Wine, Reality, Rigidity, Bad Mother

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.

Topics: Divorce, Reality, Might, Supposition

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

Topics: Home, Doors, World, Home Life

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

source: - Rachel Cusk (2015). “Outline: A Novel”, p.21, Macmillan

Topics: Character, Intuition, World

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Topics: Passion, Writing, Space

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

Topics: Reality, Might, Negative

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

source: - Rachel Cusk (2015). “Outline”, p.39, Random House

Topics: Ocean, Moving, Believe

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

source: - Rachel Cusk (2015). “Outline: A Novel”, p.82, Macmillan

Topics: Love Is, Hatred, Immortal

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

Topics: Self, Musical, Want, Undefined

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

Topics: Art, Writing, Self

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.

Topics: Motherhood, Two, Feminist

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

Topics: Two, Definitions, Belief, Definition Of Love

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

source: - Rachel Cusk (2015). “Outline: A Novel”, p.71, Macmillan

Topics: People, Demonstrating

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

Topics: Jobs

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.

Topics: Thinking, Community, Black, Rural Communities, English Countryside

I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.

Topics: Taken, Motherhood, People

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 ***** child.

Topics: Children, Writing, Risk

I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.

Topics: Thinking, Feelings, Catholic

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

source: - Rachel Cusk (2015). “Outline: A Novel”, p.160, Macmillan

Topics: Dream, Interesting, People

The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.

Topics: Mother, Mean, Body, Notice Me

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.

Topics: Art, Character, Creating

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.

Topics: People, Feminism, Needs

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

Topics: Leaving, Able, Way

Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That's the way to crush a girl.

Topics: Girl, Crush, Catholic

The British have always made terrible parents.

Topics: Parent, Made, British

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

source: - "I was only being honest" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. March 21, 2008.

Topics: Regret, Children, Thinking

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.

Topics: Lonely, Children, Reading, Reading Aloud, Furry

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

Topics: Mother, World, Tongue

There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries about how they will be seen by others through their work. When you create, you aspire to do justice to yourself, to remake yourself, and there is always the fear that you will expose the very thing that you hoped to transform.

source: - "Rachel Cusk: 'Divorce is only darkness'". Interview with Katharine Viner, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2012.

Topics: Book, Artist, Justice, Clay Pots

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.

Topics: Reality, Differences, Principles

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

Topics: Lying, Orchids, Lovely, Toxic Waste

Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.

Topics: Children, People, Firsts

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

Topics: Jobs, People, University

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

source: - "Keeping it in the family" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. August 12, 2006.

Topics: Believe, People, Stories

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

Topics: Mother

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

Topics: Children, Adults, Company

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

Topics: Encouragement, Winning, Needs

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

Topics: Gratitude, Helping, Economy

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

source: - "Keeping it in the family" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. August 12, 2006.

Topics: Results, Form, Circumstances

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

Topics: Book, Taken, Writing

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Topics: Mother, Feelings, Would Be

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

Topics: Christianity, Century

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Topics: Childhood, Curiosity, States

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

Topics: Men, Feminist, Principles

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Topics: Writing, Criticism, Honest, Honest Criticism

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

Topics: Mother

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

Topics: Novelists, Scientist, Social

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.

Topics: Epidemics, Eating Disorder, Body

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.

Topics: Writing, Ambition, Creative, Writing Workshop

Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

Topics: New Relationship, May, Facts

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

Topics: Sight, Forever, Trying

Modern morality is all about perception.

Topics: Perception, Morality, Modern

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

Topics: Children, Creativity, Writing

It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.

Topics: Baby, Having A Baby, Process

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

Topics: Thinking, Feminist, Challenges

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

Topics: Children, Waiting, Annoying, Propriety

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.

Topics: Wine, Thinking, Fake, New Toys

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.

Topics: Creativity, Ideas, Childhood

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - 'Everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?' Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

source: - "Rachel Cusk: A fine contempt". Interview with Lynn Barber, www.theguardian.com. August 29, 2009.

Topics: Important, Fundamentals, Emotion

The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Understanding

In domestic life, the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She 'wants' to be at home, and because she is a woman, she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.

Topics: Home, Desire, Want

In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She "wants" to be at home, and because she is a woman she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.

source: - "The simmering but stymied rage of stay-at-home mums" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2010.

Topics: Home, Desire, Want, Mystique, Domestic Life