Angela Carter Quotes

You don't want to make awards the reason you're doing things.

Sometimes, I'll hear from other writers or folks in the publishing industry that my books are rule-breakers, which I take as a compliment.

I never sang for a Grammy, for money, for fame. That's my whole purpose for singing: for people, for the fans.

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.

I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to judge the Man Booker if it weren't for 'Downton.'

If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

I don't think the computer will win the Booker, but no-one ever expected a computer to beat a chess grandmaster.

My job is not to get an award. My job is to illuminate people about something that they should know.

What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.

I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.

We don't do this kind of work for awards or to be recognised. We do this to share stories with the world.

Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Somebody somewhere is waiting on you to become what you were destined to be. Keep growing forward!

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.