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.
Mary McCarthy

We are the hero of our own story.
Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.
Mary McCarthy

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy