Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk is a Canadian-born novelist and writer who lives and works in the United Kingdom...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryCanada
children creativity writing
Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
writing ambition creative
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.
writing criticism honest
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
book taken writing
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
art writing self
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.
children writing risk
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
writing contemporary-fiction needs
The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.
believe writing understanding
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.
art writing reality
There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.
passion writing space
That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.
writing average skins
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.
alienate material otherwise reader unable
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.
good happy life line love obligation people sin women
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.
forceful ideas literary obviously protection speak suppose within
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.