Louis Auchincloss Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I don't give a damn what people think.

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

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!

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

Great lovers have made great sacrifices.

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.

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.

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

Your literary style reflects your personality.

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

Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Today is not forever.

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

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.