Rachel Cusk Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.”

“In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.”

“What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.”

“For years I had lived in my body half-consciously, ignoring it mostly, dismissing its agendas wherever I could, and forever pressing it into the service of mental conceptions that resulted, almost as a by-product, sometimes in its pleasuring and sometimes in its abuse.”

“In domestic life, the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She 'wants' to be at home, and because she is a woman, she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.”

“There's this really good line in 'Women in Love' where Ursula says, 'I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.' And actually I think that's very common, it's what a lot of people feel - that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can.”

“If I know somebody is coming 'round, it is incredibly difficult for me to work because I'm waiting for this interruption - even the children's comings and goings are interruptions. Cake-making is a good way of coming out of that space.”

“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 that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.”

“Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.”

“I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.”