Quote

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

Rachel Cusk

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Commentator
Commentators
Novelist
Novelists
Scientist
Social

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

Image
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
Image
An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.
Rachel Cusk
Image
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk
Image
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
Image
I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Rachel Cusk
Image
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
Image
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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