Helen Gurley Brown Quotes

Never fail to know that if you are doing all the talking, you are boring somebody.

good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere

Nearly every glamorous, wealthy, successful career woman you might envy now started out as some kind of schlep.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

Feeling insecure is good for you. It forces you to do something better, drives you to use all your talents.

Feed the alligators and you get bigger alligators.

My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.

Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort.

Don't use men to get what you want in life. Get it yourself.

If I had to choose between sex and food, I would choose food, but I'd choose sex over nearly everything else.

Work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up.

The happiest people I know are not those who are the most beautiful, rich or famous. The happiest people I see are simply those who stay cheerful and try to cheer up others while getting through their own bad stuff

The only thing that separates successful people from the ones who aren't is the willingness to work very, very hard.

People's lives change. To keep all your old friends is like keeping all your old clothes -- pretty soon your closet is so jammed and everything so crushed you can't find anything to wear. Help these friends when they need you; bless the years and happy times when you meant a lot to each other, but try not to have the guilts if new people mean more to you now.

Get up and do it if it needs to be done, even if you hate it!

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.

After you're older, two things are possibly more important than any others: health and money.

Sex is one of the three best things out there, and I don't even know what the other two are.

Good posture is the one most important thing anybody can do now to look better.

You can have your titular recognition. I'll take the money and the power.

You know you can't hope yourself a better life - you must take yourself there.

Two warm bodies and one cold bottle of champagne will produce something more wonderful than would happen without the champagne.

Now it's somewhat easier for a woman to be a film producer or something like that if she wants, though it's not that easy. But to be any kind of successful woman took a lot of doing in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s... in the '70s it's getting simpler.

I care. I care a lot. I think of Cosmopolitan all day, and I run scared. So it's a combination of fright, caring and anxiety.

Love doesn't drop on you unexpectedly; you have to give off signals, sort of like an amateur radio operator.

We are told to value ourselves without feedback, but if nobody is making a pass at you or trying to take you to Bermuda, how are you supposed to feel? Confident?

Don't do small stuff early in your energy cycle or you'll blow your 'golden hours,' but occasionally you have to do the 'possible' to develop the momentum for the killer task.

Talkers expand like bread dough.

Charm is the next best asset after looks and brains - and can almost make up for looks.

Never expect anybody - except possibly your analyst - to be as thrilled about your sex life as you are.

I just had the idea that all the covergirls should be gorgeous, and not just interesting, not beautiful in an offbeat or exotic way, just plain yummy gorgeous.

Being somebody is better than not being somebody vis à vis what you want out of life. If you want to talk to interesting people and have them talk to you, and if you want enough money to live someplace pleasant and to go on trips and be able to help people you love, you simply have to be somebody.

It's unrealistic to think you can only have one good product. People are not that poor. They can buy what they want.

I've just been so lucky. I don't know if you're really able to take advantage of your full potential until you're older. There are a few people who are incredibly gifted and make it when they are very young, but I didn't. With women it takes longer. You just keep working and when you finally get it, it feels very, very nice.

I think I'm a fairly average person, I think I have only a medium IQ. I didn't go to college, obviously.

There are not that many people who know how to edit. It's a funny tiny little obscure talent but it's very special. You have to have the feeling of popular taste.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing everyone a disservice by perpetuating the idea that beautiful is better than plain, because having done everything just about that you can do, sparing no expense, and not effort, to become better looking, I know that only so much can be done.

The prerequisite for making love is to like someone enormously.

The faster you get back to people, the less brilliant you have to be.

some bosses are so greedy (for themselves only) they forget underlings are not thirteenth-century peasants who can be satisfied with a glass of mead and three festivals a year.

Trying to describe a good marriage is like trying to describe your adrenal glands. You know they're in there functioning but you don't really understand how they work.

A man likes to sleep with a brainy girl. She’s a challenge. If he makes good with her, he figures he must be good himself.

you want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list.

If you're a little mouseburger, come with me. I was a mouseburger and I will help you. You're so much more wonderful than you think. Cosmopolitan is shot full of this stuff although outsiders don't realize it. It is, in its way, an inspiration magazine.

People never get tired of looking at beautiful pictures of gorgeous girls.

I guess I'm a survivor. There are many of us survivors and any successful woman of my age has somewhat of that in her.

Every morning when I'm thrashing around on the floor doing my solid hour of heavy exercises I'm not really doing that for anyone but myself. It makes me feel good.

My own philosophy is if you're not having sex, you're finished. It separates the girls from the old people.

I guess anyone with a beautiful body, man or woman, loves to be looked at, but to admit such a thing is a little rough at times. That's why it's hard to get people to pose.

Never throw anything good away -- real wool, pure silk. Put it away and wait for it to come back.