Mary McCarthy Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

Mary McCarthy
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

Mary McCarthy
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mary McCarthy
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Mary McCarthy
Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.
Of Lillian Hellman

Mary McCarthy
I was able to compare the sexual equipment of the various men I made love with and there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. One handsome married man, who used to arrive with two Danishes from a very good bakery, had a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil; he shall remain nameless. In my experience there was usually a relation to height, as Philip Rahv and Bill Mangold, both tall men, bore out. There may be dwarfish men with monstrously large organs, but I have never known one. It was not until later, after my second divorce, that I met an impotent man or a pervert (two of the latter)... None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal disease.

Mary McCarthy
When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

Mary McCarthy
In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Mary McCarthy
It was June, 1933, one week after Commencement, when Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar '33, the first of her class to run around the table at the Class Day dinner, was married to Harald Petersen, Reed '27, in the chapel of St. George's Church, P. E., Karl F. Reiland, Rector.

Mary McCarthy
Most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

Mary McCarthy
My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

Mary McCarthy
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing. A truth is something that everyone can be shown to know and to have known, as people say, all along.

Mary McCarthy
As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages.

Mary McCarthy
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mary McCarthy
As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.

Mary McCarthy
As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to... The worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

Mary McCarthy
When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.

Mary McCarthy
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

Mary McCarthy
The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress — these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.

Mary McCarthy
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

Mary McCarthy
If you want to be your own master... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

Mary McCarthy
You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex — that's quite a thought, isn't it?

Mary McCarthy
A doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole.

Mary McCarthy