Mary McCarthy Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'
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Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.
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A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.
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I'm the one who often makes the 'Murder, She Wrote' reference, and ABC hates that, they don't want me to do that. And I say that having never actually watched 'Murder, She Wrote'. I think people have been trying to compare it to crime shows that are on right now, and all I can do is listen. I don't watch a lot of TV.
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Kelly Clarkson definitely reminds me of Motown. She's pop, but she's also very, very soulful.
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The only way I hear gossip is if it's big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it's, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!
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My grandmother died in childbirth, and my great-aunt lived with us. She had bound feet. She never knew how to read or write.
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I used to say to my bubbe, 'Bubbe, is this story true?' And she'd say, 'Of course it's true! But it may not have happened.' What my bubbe was saying is profound: All stories are true. The truth is the journey you take through it - did it make you laugh, cry, seek and want justice? Then it's true.
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I once literally had a casting director ask my agent, 'Can she play anything other than a drunk?'
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One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.
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I would forgive my mom, but she's going to have to admit she did some things that were wrong.
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They said they wanted a lot of feathers, glitter, colourful colours. A costume. So I had a lady here in Calgary make it. She just kind of put together what I had in mind.
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If you put a much older woman in 'Doctor Who,' they can identify with it. I think it's quite an interesting concept, and if you remember things like 'Grimm's Fairytales,' the older woman is often the villainess, often the terrifying figure - why I do not know, but often she is. I think it's an idea to be exploited.
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I think the first 10 years of my daughter's life were my mother's happiest, because she could finally have carefree time with a kid.
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I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.
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We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches.
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There's acting, and then there's auditioning; mastering auditioning is sort of the first thing an actor really needs to nail down when he or she wants to get a part.
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The first lady must be a leader. She must not be a follower.
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They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate.
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What's interesting is that some of the things I'm interested in talking about is a story which has to do with the second half of your life, which can be told through Hedwig's voice because she's older. If the timeline is consistent, she's as old as me.
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My mom was the poster girl for the Marines. So she was in the poster saying, "I want you." My parents were both Marines.
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The message of 'The Distance To Here' is no secret. It is a message of love and an invitation to myself and to those who want to come along to ask the big questions and not feel uncool doing it.
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Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
