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

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

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
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

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Angela Carter

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

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

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.
Angela Carter

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

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
Angela Carter

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

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

It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
Angela Carter

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
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

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

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.
Angela Carter

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.
Angela Carter