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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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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
Doubt
Venice
Though
Doubts
Mind
Dry
Honeymooners
Always
Poets
Rationalist
Myth
Watery
Poet
Credulous
City
Inspection
Cities
Receives

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The happy ending is our national belief.
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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
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Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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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.
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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.
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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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Driving a car, you are in danger of killing walking or standing, of being killed.
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Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
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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.
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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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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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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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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.
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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.
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Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
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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.
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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.
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Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
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