Louis Auchincloss Quotes

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

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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