"As an instrument of mass snobbery, this remarkable magazine [Flair], dedicated simply to the personal cult of its editress, to the fetishism of the flower (Fleur Cowles, Flair, a single rose), outdistances all its competitors in the audacity of its conception. It is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without content or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself, one hundred and twenty pages of sheer presentation, a journalistic mirage. […] The articles, in fact, seem meant not to be read but inhaled like a whiff of scent from the mystic rose at the center (flair, through Old French, from fragrare, to emit an odor: an instinctive power of discriminating or discerning). Nobody, one imagines, has read them, not even their authors: grammatical sentences are arranged around a vanishing point of meaning."
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Novelists from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesCritics from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesPlaywrights from the United States
Original Language: English
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In the second sentence of this quote, the book has "contest" instead of "content" as in the original article in The Reporter — an obvious typo.
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Mary McCarthy
Mary Therese McCarthy (21 June 1912 – 25 October 1989) was an American author and critic.
145 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Mary McCarthy →
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