Justice & Law Quote by Joyce Cary

He’s weaponizing a punchline to expose how courts sort people into credibility classes. “Remember I’m an artist” isn’t a plea for sympathy; it’s a warning, delivered with a smirk, that the speaker expects to be treated as temperamentally unreliable. Cary’s jab - “Next worst to an actress” - lands because it’s a double insult: it concedes the stereotype (artists as liars, performers as professional pretenders) while also mocking the legal system’s craving for “serious” identities it can trust.

The line works on two levels. On the surface, it’s self-deprecation: the artist preemptively discredits himself before the court can do it. Underneath, it’s an accusation. If the law imagines truth as something delivered in a steady, prosaic voice, then anyone trained in invention is automatically suspect. Cary is pointing at a cultural reflex: we admire art for fabrication, then punish the fabricator when “facts” are demanded. That hypocrisy is the engine of the joke.

There’s also a gendered barb embedded in “actress,” reflecting a period when women on stage were routinely coded as morally and socially dubious. Cary’s aside isn’t just about performance; it’s about respectability, and how institutions equate virtue with a certain kind of life narrative. The artist’s fate, in that view, is to be compelling everywhere except the one place that insists it cannot be.