Mary McCarthy Quotes

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

It's very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it's merely about combining ingredients, but that's something you can do with your eyes closed.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

In a time when it is common for chefs to simply reproduce the innovations of others, the few who speak for themselves through their food become the skilled artists of their time.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

I feel like life imitates art, or art imitates life. I always take on roles that I'm passionate about.

I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

I deliberately look for colorful people. They're very right for theatre. Theatre has to be theatrical. If you can get color into the accountant, you've got something. Write the whole thing first and then say he's an accountant. That's a very wacky accountant, but so what? Theatricality feeds and challenges the actor, the director, and the designers.

I do not know myself how I paint it. I sit down with a white board before the spot that strikes me. I look at what is before my eyes, and say to myself, that white board must become something.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."