Angela Carter Quotes

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

Film is an incredible way to express yourself and your vision, as is fashion, but you have to make sure [to] be confident and honest and true to yourself and say something that means something, because that is really the point of any art.

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Art is only a means to life, the life more abundant. It merely points the way.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

Art is no crime. It's every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

What we also need to have a discussion on the philosophy of art: so we must ask what is it that we want in the first place? Is it just about saying and doing whatever you want, or is it about something more? We should let the artist be free, but we must also question how exactly he deals with freedom. Is it arts for elevation or arts for destruction? Is there dignity in the process?

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

There are things going on in galleries recently that have shocked me. What I'm going to say is really controversial, but what I find the most provocative is the commerciality of art in general. And the fact that a lot of people have forgotten what the meaning of art is and what the intention behind it is.