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

Rachel Cusk

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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Time
Probably
Life
Taken
Five
Write
Book
Writing
Every
Years

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
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Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
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Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk
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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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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
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A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
Rachel Cusk