Quotes from Amor Towles

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.

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.

In 1989, I had a fellowship to teach for Yale in China for two years. I came back from California to New Haven to spend the summer learning Chinese, but because of Tiananmen Square, Yale cancelled the program.

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.

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.

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.

Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.

Look at Snowden or Julian Assange. In their own way, they are free without restrictions. They are dropped in a place because of political reasons.

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.

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.

Say I lived until 80 and read a book a month seriously, that means I was looking at 480 books left in my life. If I had only 480 left, I wanted to stop sifting through material I didn't have confidence in and turn my attention to those that I know merited my reading.

In my college years, I would retreat to our summer house for two weeks in June to read a novel a day. How exciting it was, after pouring my coffee and making myself comfortable on the porch, to open the next book on the roster, read the first sentences, and find myself on the platform of a train station.

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.

I totally remember that: being 25 and unemployed and trying to stretch each cappuccino for 60 minutes.

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.

Strangely enough, my favorite airport is Logan Airport in Boston - but largely for sentimental reasons. My first real summer job was working as a journeyman for the airport's resident maintenance crew - a small army of union electricians, plumbers, and carpenters.

All the historical elements should feel organic to the story but not hammered down to serve a purpose.

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.

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.

We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We're focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.

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.

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.