Mary McCarthy Quotes

An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: Madame Bovary.

In the unreal realms of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

The happy ending is our national belief.

American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.