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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

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
Novelists
Pretend
Forget
Must
Elephant
Novelist
Elephants

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The happy ending is our national belief.
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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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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.
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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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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.
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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.
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There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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The dictator is also the scapegoat in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
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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.
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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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.
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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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.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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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.
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