Amor Towles Quotes

All the historical elements should feel organic to the story but not hammered down to serve a purpose.
As a traveler, I should probably count myself fortunate to be living in the jet age, and as an author, I know I am lucky to have a book tour at all.
As a youth, I always did a good deal of reading in the summer months, having suffered since birth from an allergy to athletic activity.
As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a sense of purpose.
As both a student of history and a man devoted to living in the present, I admit that I do not spend a lot of time imagining how things might otherwise have been. But I do like to think there is a difference between being resigned to a situation and reconciled to it.
By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.
Dad has worked as a banker at the same firm in Boston, living in the same suburban neighborhood for over 50 years. Later in life, when I got out of graduate school and imagined myself living the life of a writer like Hemingway or Kerouac, his practical self inevitably encouraged me to get a steady a job and raise a family, just like he did.
Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities.
Growing up, I didn't come from a musical family. Neither of my parents played an instrument, sang out loud, or listened to the radio with frequency. The record collection in the living room was only about 2 feet long - and that included 4 solid inches of Neil Diamond and Herb Alpert.
I always thought I was a writer on the inside, but after a few years of not writing, you can't make that claim anymore.
I had a 20-year career. I have two children. The advantage of writing later in my life is that I already had a whole mature realm of accomplishments and responsibilities, an identity outside of being a writer.
I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.
I have been writing since I was a kid. I also traveled a good deal for my work and did extended stays in places like Geneva.
I have the foundation to write, and then I go back and do research, and some of that might influence the recrafting of certain scenes.
I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.
I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.
I prefer to put myself in an environment that's further afield and look through the eyes of someone who differs from me in age, ethnicity, gender, and/or social class. I think a little displacement makes me a sharper observer.
I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.
I think that, every individual you invent in narrative work, you have to have some root in who that person is. That may be an aspect of yourself; it may be an aspect of something that you like, that you don't like. It may be an aspect that you wish you had. Maybe something you admire in another person.
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