Louis Auchincloss

“Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends.”

“What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny.”

“The novelist, if he is doing his job, is not a lecturer but a showman.”

“True love is the complete victory of curiosity over logic.”

“To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation.”

“Americans want to believe that they are in productive occupations and that their lives have meaning. But what if the only meaning is in the struggle?”

“A man who has to forge his own tools, his own grammar, his own values, is a man who has joined the ranks of the creators.”

“He had a taste for telling the truth, a taste not always shared by those to whom he told it.”

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”