The Words of Angela Carter

Angela Carter (Liam White/Alamy stock photo)

I’m not the first writer to say that Angela Carter has been one of the biggest influences on my writing.

So, I thought I’d share a collection of her words to do with writing and the creative process, and from her stories…

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

“For most of human history, ‘literature’, both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written – heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.”

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

“The moon and mirrors have this much in common: you cannot see behind them.” ~ ‘Wolf Alice’

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“For we are at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about to be ground out in the ashtray of history.” ~ ‘Nights at the Circus’

“Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice still wide open to let them all slink through.” ~ ‘The Company of Wolves’ (from ‘The Bloody Chamber’)

“The questions that I ask myself, I think they’re very much to do with reality. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I… I haven’t. They’re dull things. I mean, I’m an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”

“The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Scheherazade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: ‘This is the end.’ Because it would have been.”