Quotes from Amor Towles

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.

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.

While I began writing 'Rules of Civility' in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of 'Many Are Called,' the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.

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.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.

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.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

You can build a place that is beautiful, but nobody feels comfortable sitting in it, and the kids aren't allowed to go into many of the rooms. Or a place can look lived in, but it doesn't please the eye.

When I traveled professionally in Europe, I would inevitably spend a weekend at the Hotel Costes around the corner from the Place Vendome in Paris.

When I sat down to write 'Rules of Civility,' I didn't write it for anybody but myself. I wasn't trying to make my mark or make money. I wasn't anxious about feeding my kids or whether my father would be proud of me.

If you could relive one year in your life, which one would it be? [...] The upcoming one.

I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.

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 have the foundation to write, and then I go back and do research, and some of that might influence the recrafting of certain scenes.

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.

I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.

If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I'd have been shooting them all my life.

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.

My personal challenge as an artist has been having a day job which is intellectually satisfying and fun - and thus can easily supplant the desire to make art.

Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.

Some writers such as John Cheever and Raymond Carver seem to draw artistic energy from analyzing the realm of their own experiences - their social circles and memories and mores. I'm one of those who draw creative energy from the opposite.

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.

Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.