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

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

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

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
Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.

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 immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

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

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
The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.

Mary McCarthy
It was getting rather alarming. I realised one day that in twenty four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else…I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no-one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them.

Mary McCarthy
Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

Mary McCarthy
She had the brusque, brutal air of a person detailed to cut Gordian knots.

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
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
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.

Mary McCarthy
Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

Mary McCarthy
This is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.

Mary McCarthy
Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery — something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

Mary McCarthy
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

Mary McCarthy
The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.

Mary McCarthy
My father was a romancer and most of my memories of him are colored, I fear, by an untruthfulness that I must have caught from him, like one of the colds that ran round the family.

Mary McCarthy
Friendship... is essential to intellectuals. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

Mary McCarthy
All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered — no laughter, no tears, no purgation.

Mary McCarthy
A good deal of education consists in un-learning—the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

Mary McCarthy
I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

Mary McCarthy
You know what my favourite quotation is?…It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."

Mary McCarthy