Louis Auchincloss Quotes

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.

There's no real alternative to what there is.

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

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

Great lovers have made great sacrifices.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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 ...

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

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

Today is not forever.

I don't give a damn what people think.

Your literary style reflects your personality.

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.

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.

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.

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