Angela Carter
» Arts and Artists » “Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
» Bed » “The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.”
» Books and Reading » “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
» Christmas » “Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.”
» Comedy and Comedians » “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
» Dress » “Women’s sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.”
» Experience » “The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.”
» Feminism » “Just because we’re sisters under the skin doesn’t mean we’ve got much in common.”
» God » “Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”
» Knowledge » “There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: ”Where was I before I was born.” In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.”
» Modern and Modernism » “I think the adjective ”post-modernist” really means ”mannerist.” Books about books is fun but frivolous.”
» Mothers » “There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you’re faced with somebody whose needs won’t be put off.”
» Mothers » “The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul — enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final revenge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.”
» Pornography » “Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.”
» Prostitution » “The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder.”
» Relationships » “In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.”
» Self-image » “I think it’s one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.”
» Women » “If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”
