Mary McCarthy Quotes

• I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

  Mary McCarthy

  Topics in Uncategorized

• An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: Madame Bovary.

  Mary McCarthy

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In the unreal realms of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

  Mary McCarthy

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The happy ending is our national belief.

  Mary McCarthy

  Topics in Uncategorized

• American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

  Mary McCarthy

  Topics in Uncategorized

• You musn’t force s*x to do the work of love or love to do the work of s*x.

  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

• We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

  Mary McCarthy

• The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.

  Mary McCarthy

• 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

• 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

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

  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

• People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

  Mary McCarthy

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

  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

• Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a “work” of man.

  Mary McCarthy

• 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

• In violence, we forget who we are.

  Mary McCarthy

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

  Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (30)

Birth:	21st June, 1912
Death:	25th October, 1989
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Activist, Author, Critic

Related Authors

• Roger Stone
• Bonnie Raitt
• Cecile Richards
• Walter Sisulu
• Andre Trocme
• Charlton Heston
• Jesse Jackson
• Thomas Wentworth Higginson
• Henrietta Szold
• Sun Myung Moon

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 12th April

Births

• 1971 - Shannen Doherty
• 1822 - Donald G. Mitchell
• 1933 - Montserrat Caballe
• 1957 - Vince Gill
• 1948 - Joschka Fischer

Deaths

• 1989 - Sugar Ray Robinson
• 2006 - William Sloane Coffin
• 1933 - Adelbert Ames
• 1748 - William Kent
• 1878 - William M. Tweed