299 Quotes by Amor Towles

Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before? Sitting.

But of course, the Count also wept for himself. For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sofia – that extraordinary blessing that had struck him from the blue – when Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich died, there went the last of those who had known him as a younger man.

In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.

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.

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.

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 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.

In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.