Literary Birthday – 24 October – Amor Towles

Happy Birthday, Amor Towles, born 24 October 1964.

Amor Towles Quotes

1. If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us…then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.
2. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.
3. Slurring is the cursive of speech.
4. 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.
5. Be careful when choosing what you’re proud of–because the world has every intention of using it against you.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
9. 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.

Amor Towles is an American novelist. He worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, before devoting himself full time to writing.  He is known for his bestselling novels Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway. Both Bill Gates and President Barack Obama included A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway on their annual book recommendation lists. His latest work of fiction is the short story collection, Table For Two.

Source for image
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amor_Towles_(2018).jpg
librairie mollat, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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