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

Mary McCarthy

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Mary McCarthy
Age: 77 †
Born: 1912
Born: June 21
Died: 1989
Died: October 25
Author
Autobiographer
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Mary Therese McCarthy
Thing
Style
Really
Courses
Always
Course
Alive
Voice
Means
Everything
Irreducible
Mean
Recognizable

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
Mary McCarthy
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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Mary McCarthy
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Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
Mary McCarthy
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
Mary McCarthy
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
Mary McCarthy
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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
Mary McCarthy