Louis Auchincloss Quotes

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don't like connecting with them.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that's what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that's what I am.

Working class people vote Tory because they think it makes them look a bit posh.

Football is generally a working-class sport, and because of the fact I went to private school and was brought up slightly differently, people think that makes me a different person.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

In life there exist two classes: first class and no class.

For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.

A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?