Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life. — Rachel Cusk Book Copy Share Image
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative. — Rachel Cusk Eternal Copy Share Image
That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up. — Rachel Cusk Passion Copy Share Image
“My neighbour from the plane was a good foot shorter than me” — Rachel Cusk Neighbour Copy Share Image
“while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while… — Rachel Cusk Heart Copy Share Image
I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back. — Rachel Cusk Copy Share 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 Encouragement Copy Share Image
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime. — Rachel Cusk Alone Copy Share Image
Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority. — Rachel Cusk Attention Copy Share Image
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch… — Rachel Cusk Birth Copy Share Image
“ellipsis, he’d been told, could literally be translated as ‘to hide behind silence’. It’s fascinating stuff, he said.” — Rachel Cusk Silence Copy Share Image
“She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way:… — Rachel Cusk Disillusionment Copy Share Image
I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England… — Rachel Cusk Ability Copy Share Image
The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
“For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a… — Rachel Cusk Children Copy Share Image
If I know somebody is coming 'round, it is incredibly difficult for me to work because I'm waiting for this interruption -… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
“The sad fact...is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have… — Rachel Cusk Philosophy Copy Share Image
“I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened. And leaving university… — Rachel Cusk Adult life Copy Share Image
There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries… — Rachel Cusk Art Copy Share Image
“From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to… — Rachel Cusk Around the world Copy Share Image
“What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to… — Rachel Cusk Desire Copy Share Image
“There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if… — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
“The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals.… — Rachel Cusk Freedom Copy Share Image
“replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you… — Rachel Cusk Identity Copy Share Image
Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no… — Rachel Cusk Being Copy Share Image
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 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
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose. — Rachel Cusk Feminism 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
Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity. — Rachel Cusk Child Copy Share Image
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see. — Rachel Cusk Belief Copy Share Image
“Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.” — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
“And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If… — Rachel Cusk Love Copy Share Image
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one? — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it. — Rachel Cusk Copy Share Image
“You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.” — Rachel Cusk Life Copy Share Image
