Mary McCarthy may refer to:
The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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.
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
The happy ending is our national belief.
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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 return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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.
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.
We are the hero of our own story.
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.
Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
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.