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

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.

- Mary McCarthy

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.

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy

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.

- Mary McCarthy

You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

- Mary McCarthy

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.

- Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.

- 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

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

We are the hero of our own story.

- Mary McCarthy

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

- Mary McCarthy

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

- Mary McCarthy