Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

In any group there is more or less tension between people, and there are complicities and affinities.

There is always drama and there will always be drama, but its the way its presented in my head that makes it so interesting. Everyone gets their time in the middle of the drama.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

When you're young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There's a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.

It doesn't always turn out. It's not always a happy ending when sometimes you say things that you think, and it goes against the grain of the larger group.

Every scene has two people who want two different things, so there's conflict in every scene. You've got to duke it out, and you've got to get the other person to change his or her mind and do it your way.

My mom always said I liked to stir the pot with a glittering spoon.

A group needs enemies, because without enemies its identity cannot continue to be defined.

The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.

Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.

Sociologically, large groups of people don't generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

And I have two eyes. I’ve seen that little melodrama play out between you and that other tracker. Fish? Flounder? What’s his name?

Every great movement in the world starts with a tiny group of people who simply refuse to accept a situation.

Nobody sees people as people. It's all how they relate to my little group.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.

Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen.

Usually the characters are where I start. Then I continually ask myself, 'What's the worst thing that could happen to this character?'

I think the boarding schools are like miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."

War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.

The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.

fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.

Women just get really hard on each other.

... I think we should never underestimate the power of women's threats. If you have ever faced an angry group of women, you know that it makes one very nervous. How can we get groups of women to act in such ways as to make corporations nervous? I should like us to use this method sparingly; but it can be used.