American - Novelist | 1964 -
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
MarriageWomanFunDownToo Much
All the historical elements should feel organic to the story but not hammered down to serve a purpose.
PurposeStoryFeelDownHistorical
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.
FamilyParentsGrowing UpFeetLong
To a bookish boy in a Boston suburb in the mid-1970s, the lyrics of Cole Porter came as something of a revelation.
BoyBostonRevelationSomethingCame
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.
LifeFamilyMyselfJobSchoolMe
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.
WritingThoughtYouInsideAlways
I totally remember that: being 25 and unemployed and trying to stretch each cappuccino for 60 minutes.
RememberTryingStretchUnemployed
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.
WorkYourselfThinkWishYouPerson
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.
FocusedStudyBeingMajorityEra
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.
HistoryTimeManThinkPresent
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.
BehaviorYouValuesNostalgiaWant
Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities.
TimeYearWouldHotelsEverySpend
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