Angela Carter Quotes

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

I think the adjective "post-modernist" really means "mannerist." Books about books is fun but frivolous.

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.

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.

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.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative color and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

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.

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.