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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Infinitely
Suppose
Valuable
Criticism
Honest
Place
Writing
More quotes by Rachel Cusk
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
Rachel Cusk
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk