Marina Warner

“Ectoplasm is shapeless, it is “informe,” a kind of primordial paste—and to show itself as this, it annexes semiotic markers that designate…

— Marina Warner

I am not a great believer in dialectical struggle. I am much more of a fusion person. I see it as a…

— Marina Warner

I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.

— Marina Warner

The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is…

— Marina Warner

Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It's a deep lesson in human psychology,…

— Marina Warner

There is a theory, that I rather subscribe to. The frame story implies that if he doesn't change, she will kill him.…

— Marina Warner

Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot…

— Marina Warner

I avoid looking in the mirror.

— Marina Warner

The other thing about the Nights is that it is quite racist. One parentheses is that I think this is one of…

— Marina Warner

The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was…

— Marina Warner

One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface…

— Marina Warner

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against…

— Marina Warner

If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to…

— Marina Warner

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

— Marina Warner

For example, John Law's Mississippi Company venture printed shares, and the money had gone up in smoke when it had been inscribed…

— Marina Warner

Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a…

— Marina Warner

I used to retain information extremely fast, so perhaps it's hardening a bit and I don't take the impression as well as…

— Marina Warner

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

— Marina Warner

I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very…

— Marina Warner

The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand…

— Marina Warner

When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer…

— Marina Warner

I see the carpet reflecting that narratological structure of the storytelling, with Scheherazade as the outside frame story on the outside, with…

— Marina Warner

Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all…

— Marina Warner

I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was…

— Marina Warner

Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.

— Marina Warner