The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.
Mary McCarthySex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthyFor self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
Mary McCarthy... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Mary McCarthyThe breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.
Mary McCarthy