That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up. — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
“She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.” — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
“If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
If I know somebody is coming 'round, it is incredibly difficult for me to work because I'm waiting for this interruption - even the… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back -… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you. — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude. — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose. — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
“At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
“From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to bend to… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
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… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share
