Mary McCarthy Zitate

"Characters in Fiction", p. 276. First published in Partisan Review (March 1961)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

"The Hue and Cry," The Writing on the Wall (1970)
Kontext: Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann — that is, aesthetically worse — but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassable to conscience.

Interview by Elisabeth Niebuhr in "The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, Second Series" (1963) [the interview took place in March 1961]
Kontext: 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 — how to express this — you really must make the self. It's absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it.

Quelle: Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975

Dottie in Ch. 2
The Group (1963)

As quoted in "Lady with a Switchblade" in LIFE magazine (20 September 1963) http://books.google.com/books?id=e1IEAAAAMBAJ&q=%22Europeans+used+to+say+Americans+were+puritanical+Then+they+discovered+that+we+were+not+puritans+So+now+they+say+that+we+are+obsessed+with+sex%22&pg=PA62#v=onepage

"The Writing on the Wall"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)

"Gandhi", p. 22. First published in Politics (Winter 1948)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Comment about Lillian Hellman in a televised interview (1979) on The Dick Cavett Show; this prompted a defamation suit against McCarthy which was dropped after Hellman's death: "If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. I didn't want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that."

"The American Realist Playwrights", p. 296. First published in Harper's Magazine (July 1961)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

"My Confession", p. 74. First published in two parts in The Reporter (December 22, 1953 and January 5, 1954)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

"My Confession", p. 102
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

"To the Reader"
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

Commenting on her novel The Group. New York Herald Tribune (5 January 1964)

"To the Reader"
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

Quelle: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 6

"Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue", p. 185. First published in two parts in The Reporter (July 18 and August 1, 1950)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Quelle: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. I, p. 293, first lines of novel

"Solutions," Vietnam (1967)

"Characters in Fiction", p. 291
Sometimes misquoted as "We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story."
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

"The Fact in Fiction", p. 266. First published in Partisan Review (Summer 1960)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Look (26 February 1964)

"My Confession", p. 76
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Quelle: Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938 (1992), Ch. 2

Quelle: The Group (1963), Ch. 1, first lines of novel

"Everybody's Childhood"
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970)

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 8. First published in Commentary (September 1947)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)