Mary McCarthy Quotes & Sayings

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

“We are the hero of our own story.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.”

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

“Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.”

“In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.”