Wit & Attitude Quote by Mary McCarthy

A perfect literary knife-fight in nine words: McCarthy turns the most basic building blocks of language into weapons, insisting the deceit is so total it infects even the connective tissue of a sentence. The punchline is the specificity. Not “everything she writes is a lie” (a cliché you can swat away), but “including and and the” - a sneer at the very idea that the writer in question can be trusted to do the smallest honest thing, like join two nouns or point to a definite object.

The line is also a performance of McCarthy’s own authority. It doesn’t argue; it sentences. That’s the subtext: in literary culture, credibility is currency, and McCarthy is minting her own by declaring someone else bankrupt. There’s wit here, but it’s acid wit, the kind that makes you laugh and then check whether you’ve been laughing at cruelty.

Context sharpens the intent. McCarthy fired this at playwright Lillian Hellman, a feud rooted in competing claims to moral seriousness and autobiographical truth. Hellman’s memoirs were widely challenged; McCarthy’s remark crystallized the suspicion that Hellman didn’t just embellish - she fabricated. The quote later ricocheted into a famous libel suit, which Hellman filed and which outlived her, turning a salon insult into a public referendum on truth-telling as a literary pose.

What makes it endure is its cynical clarity about how reputations are made: not only by what you write, but by what others can plausibly say about your relationship to reality. McCarthy’s insult sticks because it’s engineered to be unanswerable without sounding defensive.