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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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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
Everyone
Truth
Love
Recognizable
Ruling
Ordinary
Novel
Passion
Common

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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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.
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The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
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A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.
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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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Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.
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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
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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 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.
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.
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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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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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Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
Mary McCarthy
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
Mary McCarthy
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In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the knowledge, seems sufficiently final.
Mary McCarthy