American novelist (1917-2010)
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Atlantic Online, Oct. 15, 1997
Today is not forever.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth
A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Pioneers and Caretakers
The crowd has a way of being right.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, Oct. 15, 1997
Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
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!
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Financial Times, 2007
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
A Writer's Capital
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
interview, American Legends
I couldn't bear to see a chapter of the gospel turned into a chapter of Trollope.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
Maybe when I'm dead, I'll be forgiven, but I'm afraid I'll also be forgotten.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
interview, BOMB Magazine, fall 1997
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
East Side Story
Your literary style reflects your personality.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Paris Review, fall 1994
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.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, Oct. 15, 1997
Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Pioneers and Caretakers