Louis Auchincloss Quotes

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  • 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.

    Art   Renaissance   Awful  
  • 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.

    Writing   Feet   Fire  
  • Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

    Matter  
    Louis Auchincloss (2010). “A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth”, p.169, HMH
  • A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

    Genius   Dull   Danger  
    1965 Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists.
  • Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

    Love   Boys   Men  
    Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • I couldn't bear to see a chapter of the gospel turned into a chapter of Trollope.

    Bears   Chapters  
    Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • There's no real alternative to what there is.

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

    Men   Energy  
  • I don't give a damn what people think.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    Gratitude   Fate   Dying  
    Louis Auchincloss (2004). “East Side Story: A Novel”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (2004). “East Side Story: A Novel”, p.93, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (1979). “Life, Law, and Letters: Essays and Sketches”, Houghton Mifflin
  • 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.

    Country   Grace   Delight  
  • 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.

    Mother   Pain   Children  
    Louis Auchincloss (1965). “The Rector of Justin”
  • Today is not forever.

    Forever   Today  
    Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin: A Novel”, p.349, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Decent artists go through bad times but eventually they do get recognized. It's by no means a battle lost. Yet.

    Mean   Artist   Battle  
  • 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.

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

  • 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 (2010). “A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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!

    School   Thinking   Long  
  • Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.

    Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.333, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

    1965 Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists.
  • Your literary style reflects your personality.

  • 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.

    Heart   Ideas   Littles  
    Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin: A Novel”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • If you can sense the corruption in me, it is ... because there's a dose of it in you.

    Corruption   Dose   Ifs  
    Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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.

    Reading   Yale   Rome  
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