Quotes from Rachel Cusk

For many women,' she said, 'having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,' she said, 'the mother's sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman's ought to be these days.

A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.

Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can't restore, it takes away the pain.

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.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

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.

I'm particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it's that area I'm very alive to. And I don't encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.

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.

I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.

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.

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

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.

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

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.

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

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 friends, or a small furry animal that's lost to find its parents; it lasts as long as a quick avowal of love; it lasts precisely as long as the average parent is disposed on a Tuesday night to spend reading aloud to children.

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

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

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.