SOURCE: An interview with Louis Auchincloss, in The Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1988, pp. 20-37.

In this excerpt from an interview conducted between October 1985 and July 1987, Auchincloss discusses various subjects related to his work, including characterization and the evolution of his career. The author also comments on his relationship with other writers and his opinion of contemporary society and the world of letters.

[Piket]: You have written that most of a writer's characters are just himself "wearing different funny hats".

[Auchincloss]: That seems true to me. Basically you have no one else to write about other than yourself, no other source than yourself. Who else do you know, I mean truly know? It's a banal but true thing that we are all islands, with very little knowledge, deep down, of other people. If we read that Napoleon was banned to Elba, then of course we...