Rachel Quotes

The goal of the first International May Day celebrations was the eight-hour working day.

For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

Eleanor Marx was a pragmatic person of actions and deeds and she was an organizer.

When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

I've been a victim in every film I have done so far. It would be nice to play someone who doesn't get killed for once. Then again, I am getting really good at screaming and fake tears...

It was never my goal to be an actor.

Being boring is just wrong, isn't it? You wouldn't have got anywhere being boring.

I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

I don't mind being called snobbish, a pain and a social climber, but being called unkind really hurts.

I am a total coffee snob and bore. If anyone makes the mistake of offering me 'a coffee' they tend to regret it - I'm worse than Mariah Carey, and the hot milk rider is completely non-negotiable.

I want 'The Lady' magazine to be restored to its traditional place in the pantheon of weekly magazines.

I'd like to see women get on to boards and run companies despite the fact that men occupy the citadels of power.

There was a time when no difficult subjects were ever aired in the 'Lady', and sadly, life isn't like that.

If you tell the truth you get into trouble, and that's why politicians are extremely dull.

The Lady' is a piddling little magazine that no one cares about or buys.

Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings.

you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.

The least planned part of the journey, however, was the journey itself.

Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.

If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope.

It was not a life, if lived without love.

After the two drinks, she felt warm inside, and slightly indistinct at the edges.

And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things: that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same.

But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.

He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others.

There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.

I'm one of those always busy type of people, so when there's a lull, I find something to fill it.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.