Quotes from Mary McCarthy

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

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

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.

... 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.

Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

The happy ending is our national belief.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

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 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.

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

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

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

We are the hero of our own story.

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

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

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

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

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