Mary McCarthy Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

Mary McCarthy
If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

Mary McCarthy
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

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
The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux — here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature.

Mary McCarthy
Like all such official types, he specialized in being his own antithesis: strong but understanding, boisterous but grave, pragmatic but speculative when need be. The necessity of encompassing such opposites had left him with a little wobble of uncertainty in the center of his personality.

Mary McCarthy
It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

Mary McCarthy
Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.

Mary McCarthy
Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.

Mary McCarthy
A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

Mary McCarthy
The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

Mary McCarthy
Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.

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

Mary McCarthy
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

Mary McCarthy
The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.

Mary McCarthy
The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

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
On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

Mary McCarthy
All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can't go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness.

Mary McCarthy
The relation between life and literature — a final antimony — is one of mutual plagiarism.

Mary McCarthy
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

Mary McCarthy
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.... If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.

Mary McCarthy
Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

Mary McCarthy
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

Mary McCarthy
Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

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's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

Mary McCarthy
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

Mary McCarthy
A wholly materialistic city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world's unconscious.

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