About Rachel Cusk: Rachel Cusk is a Canadian-born novelist and writer who lives and works in the United Kingdom.
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
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...
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
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...
The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.
Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger...
But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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 abou...
I sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it's meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn't, and that makes me very angry.
Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pas...
To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?
Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.
