Rachel Cusk Quotes
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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.
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To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.
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Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.
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I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.
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I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.
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Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That's the way to crush a girl.
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Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.
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The old world of England was picturesque and safe in a way that L.A. wasn't, but it was so amazingly socially cruel. I had never experienced that in America - never in school, nowhere.
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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
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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.
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I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.
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The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.
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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.
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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
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I think men and women are the same. Even as parents, I think we're the same. We're just conditioned to think that we're different. Having said that, it's true that motherhood is a particularly vulnerable area. It's an open wound, really. A woman is exposed to being turned into a different kind of person by the experience of motherhood.
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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.
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I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.
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The anorexic is out to prove how little she needs, how little she can survive on; she is out, in a sense, to discredit her nurturers, while at the same time making a public crisis out of her need for nurture. Such vulnerability and such power: it brings the whole female machinery to a halt.
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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.
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The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.
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What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.
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I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.