Angela Carter Quotes

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Angela Carter

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 7, 1940

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.

Angela Carter

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

Angela Carter

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.

Angela Carter

Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.

Angela Carter

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

Angela Carter

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

Angela Carter

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

Angela Carter

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

Angela Carter

A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

Angela Carter

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

Angela Carter

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

Angela Carter

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

Angela Carter

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.

Angela Carter

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.

Angela Carter

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

Angela Carter

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Angela Carter

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Angela Carter

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Angela Carter

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

Angela Carter

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

Angela Carter