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.

Angela Carter

Categorized in : Art Mean Life

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

Angela Carter

vices memories watches

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

Angela Carter

language-and-power instruments culture

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

Angela Carter

what-matters writing book

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

Angela Carter

new-york men sex

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day.

Angela Carter

lonely writing thinking

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

Angela Carter

salt eggs literature

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

Angela Carter

moonlight white rose

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

angel culture thinking

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Angela Carter

dance joy

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

Angela Carter

eye house doe

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

reading writing book

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

Angela Carter

nostalgia names europe

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

Angela Carter

surrealism reason reality

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

Angela Carter

laughter laughing children

The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.

Angela Carter

carnivores taste flesh

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

Angela Carter

reading writing book

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

hypothesis pins literature

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

Angela Carter

sunshine contracts california

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

Angela Carter

commodity taken world

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.

Angela Carter

pleasure greater anticipation