Louis Auchincloss Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Louis Auchincloss
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.

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

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

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

Louis Auchincloss
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
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
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
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.

Louis Auchincloss