Mary McCarthy quotes:

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

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

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.

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.

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.

Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.

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.

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

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

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

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.

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.

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

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

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.

Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

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

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 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.

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 all too much a professional air.

Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

We are the hero of our own story.

I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.

With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.

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

In violence, we forget who we are.

The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux - here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature.

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.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

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

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

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

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

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.

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

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

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

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

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.

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

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.

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

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.

In violence, we forget who we are

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.

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

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.

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

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture.

...the tourist Venice is Venice.

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

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

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.

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.

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.

Be truthful... and pay attention. I would also recommend the avoidance of credit cards.

Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother's nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. ...The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others ...

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

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

Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.

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

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people...

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

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. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

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

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.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final.

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

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.

it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.

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

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.

Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind ...

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

Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house.

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.

Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.

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

Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

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

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

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

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

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.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.

The famous Florentine elegance, which attracts tourists to the shops on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, is characterized by austerity of line, simplicity, economy of effect.

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.