Rachel Cusk Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Modern morality is all about perception.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The British have always made terrible parents.

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

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