Louis Auchincloss Quotes & Sayings

Only little boys and old men sneer at love. — Louis Auchincloss

If you can sense the corruption in me, it is ... because there's a dose of it in you. — Louis Auchincloss

With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband's absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office. — Louis Auchincloss

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed. — Louis Auchincloss

You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family
children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses
you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that. — Louis Auchincloss

Today is not forever. — Louis Auchincloss

There's no point discussing an engagement with a person determined that nothing will convince her that her love is not the be-all and end-all of her life. — Louis Auchincloss

Once somebody's aware of a plot, it's like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it's very ugly. — Louis Auchincloss

It's very rare that a character comes to mind complete in himself. He needs additional traits that I often pick from actual people. One way you can cover your tracks is to change the sex. — Louis Auchincloss

Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that. — Louis Auchincloss

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were. — Louis Auchincloss

Society matters not so much. Words are everything. — Louis Auchincloss

I don't give a damn what people think. — Louis Auchincloss

Keep doing good deeds long enough and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself. — Louis Auchincloss

Decent artists go through bad times but eventually they do get recognized. It's by no means a battle lost. Yet. — Louis Auchincloss

I didn't have to say another word, and I had the sense not to. I had gained Sumner's full attention, and that was all I needed. He looked at me; he really saw me, for perhaps the first time, and Pa thereafter got only his second glances. I won't say that I caught Sumner with three words, but they gave me a start. To keep up his image of the bright and thoughtful woman he had idealized for himself I had only to let him develop his own conception. I wouldn't have to do a thing until we get married. Then, of course, I could relax. Hasn't that been the story of millions of women? — Louis Auchincloss

It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today. — Louis Auchincloss

I was sophisticated enough to know that the written word is no mirror of the writer's character, that the amateur, though a selfless angel, may show himself a pompous ass, while the professional, a monster of ego, can convince you in a phrase that he has the innocence of a child. I — Louis Auchincloss

But I'm afraid you've blotted your copybook fatally with Clara. — Louis Auchincloss

In my day, they were not interested in making boys happy. Those schools were made for the types of men who would become quite successful. It was brutal. They are not brutal today. They are country clubs today. — Louis Auchincloss

No! It's not your fault. You belong to the last generation of women who have been brought up to use their sex appeal to further their ambition. — Louis Auchincloss

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull. — Louis Auchincloss

I don't know enough about the lower classes to write about them. I don't feel with them, and that could be regarded as a defect, a limitation of my imagination. I could put myself in their position, but not politically. The idea of writing a story or a book about somebody completely devoid of appreciation of anything I care about is completely foreign to me. — Louis Auchincloss

Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country ... with hope and delight. — Louis Auchincloss

A common objection to inherited wealth is that it stifles the urge to work. I have not generally observed this to be true. — Louis Auchincloss

To most readers the word 'fiction' is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author's part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it. — Louis Auchincloss

The crowd has a way of being right. — Louis Auchincloss

I couldn't bear to see a chapter of the gospel turned into a chapter of Trollope. — Louis Auchincloss

I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate. — Louis Auchincloss

Violet, surveying him with a cruel detachment, had never felt less married. — Louis Auchincloss

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life. — Louis Auchincloss

Why should I reward his dirty tricks with my lily-white hand? — Louis Auchincloss

And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She — Louis Auchincloss

Your literary style reflects your personality. — Louis Auchincloss

I had always been considered such a nonentity where human relations were concerned that the idea that I might have an influence, even a corrupting influence ... penetrated my heart with a fierce little sting of pleasure. — Louis Auchincloss

A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere
even in prison. — Louis Auchincloss

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life
a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it
filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction ... — Louis Auchincloss

There's no real alternative to what there is. — Louis Auchincloss

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it. — Louis Auchincloss

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper
you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end. — Louis Auchincloss

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me. — Louis Auchincloss

Polly's embarrassment revealed her regret that she should have given in to the age-old temptation of saying something disagreeable even to her oldest and most useful friend. But she had committed herself now. "I relate it," she replied in a bolder tone, "to my apprehension that you are using your perfectly proper wish to do great and noble things with Eric's money to disguise your equally natural desire to keep it out of the greedy hands of his family. — Louis Auchincloss

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate. — Louis Auchincloss

Maybe when I'm dead, I'll be forgiven, but I'm afraid I'll also be forgotten. — Louis Auchincloss

There is a charm, even for homely things, in perfect maintenance. — Louis Auchincloss

Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith. — Louis Auchincloss

The only thing that keeps a man going is energy. And what is energy but liking life? — Louis Auchincloss

A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.
Louis Auchincloss — Louis Auchincloss

Consider, children ... the pain of touching the tip of your finger to your mother's stove, even for a fraction of a second. That is an experience which most of you have suffered. Now try to imagine that pain, not simply on a fingertip but spread over the whole surface of your body, and not for a mere second, but everlastingly. That, children, is hellfire. — Louis Auchincloss

The whole thing is so degrading! That a man like Eric should be reduced to crawling before those bloodsuckers who are taking every advantage of his weakened state. And strip himself of one whole third of his wealth to throw it away like all the huge sums they've already got out of him! — Louis Auchincloss

Great lovers have made great sacrifices. — Louis Auchincloss

I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I'm still living in one! ... The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs
all the old clubs
are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today ... Where is this 'vanished world' they talk about? I don't think the critics have looked out the window! — Louis Auchincloss