Mary McCarthy Quotes
In violence, we forget who we are... view
By: Mary McCarthy
Life for the European is a career.. view
By: Mary McCarthy
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man... view
By: 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... view
By: Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism... view
By: Mary McCarthy
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it.. view
By: Mary McCarthy
Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof... view
By: Mary McCarthy
The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth.. view
By: Mary McCarthy
We all live in suspense from day to day.. view
By: Mary McCarthy
We are the hero of our own story... view
By: 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... view
By: Mary McCarthy
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof... view
By: Mary McCarthy
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex... view
By: 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... view
By: 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... view
By: Mary McCarthy
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children... view
By: 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... view
By: Mary McCarthy
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality... view
By: 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, is that you really must make the self... view
By: Mary McCarthy
I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake... view
By: Mary McCarthy
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the... view
By: Mary McCarthy
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted... view
By: 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... view
By: 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... view
By: 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... view
By: Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons... view
By: Mary McCarthy