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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
Forget
Must
Elephant
Novelist
Elephants
Novelists
Pretend

More quotes by 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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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.
Mary McCarthy
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
Mary McCarthy
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With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
Mary McCarthy
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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 - how to express this - you really must make the self.
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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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
Mary McCarthy
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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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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.
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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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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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The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.
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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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
Mary McCarthy
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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
Mary McCarthy
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Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.
Mary McCarthy
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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
Mary McCarthy