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Amor Towles

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#Tags
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. - Amor Towles
#Best
#Book
#Civility
#Rules
#Still
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. - Amor Towles
#Activity
#Always
#Birth
#Good
#Youth
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. - Amor Towles
#Children
#Identity
#Life
#My Life
#Two
What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. - Amor Towles
#Impression
#More
#Tell
#Us
#Why
One restaurant I visit without fail, whenever I'm in the Bay Area, is the Boulevard at 1 Mission Street, a few strides from the waterfront. It has excellent food and wine very much in the modern California style, but I go there less for any one dish than for the pleasure of dining with the restaurant's chefs. - Amor Towles
#Food
#Mission
#Restaurant
#Street
#Style
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. - Amor Towles
#Architecture
#Change
#Music
#Painting
Of course, you wouldn't want to re-create the era of aristocracy; it was a totally unfair era. The finer aspects of it were admirable, and so there's nostalgia for that: the behavior, the values, the cultural sensitivities. - Amor Towles
#Behavior
#Era
#Nostalgia
#Unfair
#Values
By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration. - Amor Towles
#Complex
#Deserve
#Human
#Nature
#Only
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. - Amor Towles
#Love
#Majority
#Purpose
#Survive
#Trying
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. - Amor Towles
#Everything
#Late
#Life
#Me
#Wisdom
When I visited Moscow for the first time in 1998, I wandered into the historic Metropol Hotel as a curious tourist simply to ogle the giant painted glass ceiling that hangs over the grand restaurant off the lobby. It was the memory of that short visit that prompted me, some years later, to set 'A Gentleman in Moscow' in the hotel. - Amor Towles
#Gentleman
#Me
#Memory
#Restaurant
#Time
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. - Amor Towles
#Age
#Eyes
#Look
#Me
#Myself
When I was 10 years old, I threw a bottle with a note in it in the ocean in Massachusetts, and Harrison Salisbury found it and contacted me. We began a correspondence that lasted for years, and I eventually met him when I was 18. - Amor Towles
#Bottle
#Me
#Note
#Ocean
#Old
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. - Amor Towles
#Dad
#Family
#Life
#Me
#Myself
My grandmother, who was simultaneously a woman of manners and verve, fended off marriage proposals until she was 30 because she was having too much fun to settle down. - Amor Towles
#Fun
#Manners
#Marriage
#Too Much
#Woman
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. - Amor Towles
#Behavior
#Cake
#Struggle
#Sweet
#World
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