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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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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Writing
Skins
Thickness
Thing
Average
Penetrates
Good
Writers
Review
None
Penetrate
Influence
Pleased
Write
Reviews
Next
Disappointed
Enough
Skin

More quotes by 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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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Rachel Cusk
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The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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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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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
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
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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.
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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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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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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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I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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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
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A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
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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