Quotes from Louis Auchincloss

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

Great lovers have made great sacrifices.

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

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

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.

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.

The crowd has a way of being right.

When he spoke his voice had a curious softness that I did not remember having heard before, like a sigh after the passage of some terrible pain.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Your literary style reflects your personality.

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.

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

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

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

In that moment I think I learned the real tragedy of living too long. It is not losing one's health or one's memory or even one's mind; it is losing one's dignity.

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...

Today is not forever.

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