Rachel Cusk

“The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - 'Everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?' Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.”

“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.”

“As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition — I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”

“So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.”

“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.”

“How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?”

“Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, en la que escapar no es una realidad, sino algo con lo que de vez en cuando sueñan.”

“To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.”

“I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.”

“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 about churches.”

“The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back - to be 'taught' - is disturbing.”

“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.”

“It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.”

“Modern morality is all about perception.”

“It's a taboo that comes back over and over, to suggest that women can feel divided - that you can love your child and want to do everything for it, and at the same time want to put it away from you and reclaim something of yourself.”

“I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.”

“Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.”

“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.”

“There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.”

“Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.”