Angela Carter

"Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it."

"Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism."

"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."

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

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

"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."

"My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis."

"I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. 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."

"Her writing life began in her early 20s in , where she and her first husband, Paul Carter, were part of the folk scene. The and her early novels are set against a landscape more postwar than pop, of derelict houses and bombsites turning to waste ground. The first, ', came out in 1966. Two more followed, establishing her as a promising writer, albeit not one likely to prop up the literary establishment. Shy, with a slight stammer, she veered from gauche to wildly outspoken. After a reading by in 1968 she buttonholed AS Byatt, who recalled: “This very disagreeable woman stomped up to me and she said, ‘My name’s Angela Carter … and I wanted to stop and tell you that the sort of thing you’re doing is no good at all.’” The “sort of thing” she meant was the in which “people drink tea and commit adultery”."

"One thing that happens with gothic fiction, and I think the person who explores this most keenly is probably Angela Carter in her collection of retold fairy tales, is that gothic fiction seems to echo certain fairy tales...She pulls at these threads that fairy tales have, these elements that they have that we don’t think about much."