Top 45 Rachel Cusk Quotes

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.

I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.

Female hysteria is a subject I’m very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.

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.

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.

It seems to me that ‘women’s writing’ by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

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

Writing is a discipline: it’s almost all about holding back.

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

I don’t think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time – I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, ‘Actually, this is a valid pastime.’

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.

I’m particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it’s that area I’m very alive to. And I don’t encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn’t 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.

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

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.

In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn’t have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.

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

It is expected that a children’s story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.

For years I had lived in my body half-consciously, ignoring it mostly, dismissing its agendas wherever I could, and forever pressing it into the service of mental conceptions that resulted, almost as a by-product, sometimes in its pleasuring and sometimes in its abuse.

The old world of England was picturesque and safe in a way that L.A. wasn’t, but it was so amazingly socially cruel. I had never experienced that in America – never in school, nowhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I absolutely don’t dislike children – I would choose their company over adult company any time.

A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man.

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 sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it’s meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn’t, and that makes me very angry.

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

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

The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

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.

There’s this really good line in ‘Women in Love’ where Ursula says, ‘I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.’ And actually I think that’s very common, it’s what a lot of people feel – that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can.

I have a romantic conception of the writer’s life, and the sort of writer’s life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life – I’m in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that’s never been something I’m capable of doing.

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.

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

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