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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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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
Imagination
Inactive
Race
Races
Physically
Affair
Lonely
Reader
Writer
Novel

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

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Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
Mary McCarthy
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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.
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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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.
Mary McCarthy
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love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.
Mary McCarthy
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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
Mary McCarthy
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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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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The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.
Mary McCarthy
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America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
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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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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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
Mary McCarthy
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
Mary McCarthy
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We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy