There's a line in a poem of my youth, a poem by Allen Ginsberg called Howl in which he issues this dreadful warning: 'America, I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.' But that sense of weighty responsibility with which some writers approach this fills me with a kind of wild terror. I don't think art is as important as all that and I don't think you can do all that much with fiction. It does seem to me that artists, far from being the unconscious legislators of mankind, tend to be parasitic upon those in productive labour. And therefore we really have a big responsibility to deliver the goods. I mean most people would prefer to be artists than to work for Ford in Dagenham after all. Therefore there is a responsibility to deliver the goods, to cheer people up by suggesting that possibly there is hope. I feel that if we all put our queer shoulders to the wheel together, it may be possible to move it an inch, a quarter of an inch, a centimetre, shake it. But it's very difficult knowing where to start because a certain kind of bland quietism seems to have taken over the intelligentsia. - Angela Carter