Literary Birthday – 6 June – Mignon McLaughlin

Mignon McLaughlin was born 6 June 1913, and died 20 December 1983.

I tell you this, and I tell you plain
What you have done, you will do again
You will bite your tongue, careful or not
Upon the already-bitten spot.

10 Neurotic Quotes

Everybody can write; writers can’t do anything else.
Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children.
Most sermons sound to me like commercials – but I can’t make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.
We would all like a reputation for generosity and we’d all like to buy it cheap.
When threatened, the first thing a democracy gives up is democracy.
Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.
It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn’t.
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.
It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t.
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

Mignon McLaughlin was an American journalist and author. She wrote two volumes entitled The Neurotic’s Notebook and The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook. She became a journalist and a writer of short stories for Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and other women’s magazines. She worked for Vogue in the 1940s, and was Copy Editor and Managing Editor of Glamour magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s.