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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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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Process
Sentence
Character
Intuition
Good
Sentences
Subtlest
World
Neither
Adjustments
Question
Exaggeration
Possible
Adjustment
Force
Fatal
Born
Establish

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
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Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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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My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
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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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
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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It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.
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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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
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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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk