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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: 58
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Next
Disappointed
Enough
Skin
Writing
Skins
Thickness
Thing
Average
Penetrates
Good
Writers
Review
None
Penetrate
Influence
Pleased
Write
Reviews

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

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Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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Modern morality is all about perception.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
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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.
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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.
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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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.
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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
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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.
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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
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