"The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero."
Read quote
10 likes
Quote collection
Mary McCarthy quotes (page 2 of 7)
136 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins."
Read quote
9 likes
"You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex."
Read quote
9 likes
"To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics."
Read quote
8 likes
"What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard."
Read quote
7 likes
"Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished."
Read quote
7 likes
"Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes