Mary McCarthy Quotes

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Film sets are constantly amusing because you really are creating something that is so very surreal, and I kind of like that.

Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let's say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either - in the case of horror - more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.

My pictures are about getting as far away from reality as possible. Dreams should be part of our everyday life.

I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense.

I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."

I'm always interested in an atmosphere where dreams and reality mingle on equal terms.

My recent drawings that personal ones aren't fashion-related. I sometimes sit and draw people on the bus, or some fantasy hybrid animal. You know, wherever the hand will lead.

I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it's a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.

We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.

Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.