Mary McCarthy Quotes
As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.
Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
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.
The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.
The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.
Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
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.
love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.
Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.
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.
I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
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 behaviour.
