Mary McCarthy

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

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

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

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

Liberty as it is conceived by current opinion has nothing inherent about it it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behaviour.

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

The happy ending is our national belief.

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

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light.

Every word she writes is a lie, including __nd_ and __he_."(on Lillian Hellman)