Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are

— Mary McCarthy

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

— Mary McCarthy

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

— Mary McCarthy

The happy ending is our national belief.

— Mary McCarthy

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

— Mary McCarthy

...the tourist Venice is Venice.

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

— Mary McCarthy

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to…

— 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

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

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think,…

— Mary McCarthy

Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by…

— Mary McCarthy

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about…

— Mary McCarthy

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

— Mary McCarthy

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a…

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity…

— Mary McCarthy

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the…

— Mary McCarthy

I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if…

— Mary McCarthy

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause…

— Mary McCarthy

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is…

— 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…

— Mary McCarthy

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think,…

— Mary McCarthy

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic…

— Mary McCarthy

“This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants…

— Mary McCarthy

“I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low…

— Mary McCarthy

In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak.

— Mary McCarthy

We are the hero of our own story.

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

— Mary McCarthy

“She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.”

— Mary McCarthy

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

— Mary McCarthy