Mary McCarthy

“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”

“Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.”

“In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.”

“We are the hero of our own story.”

“We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.”

“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

“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.”

“Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

“Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.”

“Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.”

“I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.”

“In violence, we forget who we are.”

“The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.”

“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.”

“If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.”

“The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.”

“Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.”

“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 you really must make the self.”

“Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.”

“The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.”