Quotes from Louis Auchincloss

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

Great lovers have made great sacrifices.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

There's no real alternative to what there is.

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.

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.

Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

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.

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?

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

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

I don't give a damn what people think.