Mary McCarthy - Novel Quotes

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Love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

Mary McCarthy

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

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

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

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

Mary McCarthy

The souped-up novels that are being written today, with injections of myth and symbols to heighten or deepen the material, are simply evasions and forms of self-flattery.

Mary McCarthy