Mary McCarthy

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

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.

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

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.

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

In violence, we forget who we are.

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 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.

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.

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.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

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.

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

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the hero of our own story.

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.

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.