Rachel Cusk Quotes

I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.

I tell my writing students that everything is material; just pay attention.

After 'Where the Wild Things Are,' I guess I felt more confident as a writer.

The best thing about being Children's Laureate has definitely been all the children and teens I've met.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

I absolutely love writing and sharing my enthusiasm with students, and because of 'Hattie Big Sky,' Montana holds a special place in my heart.

Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I get my inspiration from looking at the world and paying attention to people and just looking closely. Also from reading. I get so much inspiration from other authors.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

If you're going to write, you're going to have to force yourself to really study the world.

I might see something on TV and get inspired to write about it. I can't sit down and plan to write. It has to come to me in my head like someone telling me the words.

The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won't leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I'm driving my kids to school, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store.