RACHEL CUSK

The British have always made terrible parents.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

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 don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

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.

The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

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.

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.

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.

Modern morality is all about perception.

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.

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

Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pastime which is being dishonestly subjected to counterintuitive methods.

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.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.

The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

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

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

A book is not an example of 'women's writing' simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become 'women's writing' when it could not have been written by a man.