Literary Birthday – 27 September – Louis Auchincloss 

Louis Auchincloss was born 27 September 1917, and died 26 January 2010.

10 Quotes

1. Society matters not so much. Words are everything.
2. 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.
3. Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
4. Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.
5. A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognise when he is dull.
6. Today is not forever.
7. 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.
8. Great lovers have made great sacrifices.
9. 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.
10. Your literary style reflects your personality.

Louis Auchincloss was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a novelist who explored the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. Auchincloss’s best-known books are the multi-generational sagas The House Of Five Talents, Portrait in Brownstone, and East Side Story: A Novel.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_Auchincloss_with_President_Bush.jpg

White House photo by Eric Draper, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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