Amor Towles Quotes

I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.

Everyone loves to get a letter. I love sending them. I love getting them.

I was a pen pal with one guy, a long time ago. I think we only wrote to each other twice. We didn't really keep it up that long. But, I love it. I think it's really sweet and very creative and freeing, when you get to put a pen to paper, 'cause you don't really do it that much these days, with all this technology.

Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.

I think jamming is the way we begin to communicate. In the old days, people actually wrote notes on paper and sent them to each other. I guess that's how they jammed.

I think because I'm not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.

Sending a handwritten letter is becoming such an anomaly. It's disappearing. My mom is the only one who still writes me letters. And there's something visceral about opening a letter - I see her on the page. I see her in her handwriting.

I always write authors after I read their books. I've been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.

I don't write letters anymore.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty. Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

He was an answer to a question she'd forgotten to ask.

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Letter-writing I imagine is counted as 'work' from which you must abstain, and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see, I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence. Hence you have nothing to answer.

But why should you be interested in me?" Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.

There is little one can say about love. It has to be lived, and it's always in motion.

Inviting people to inquiry is much more powerful to me than describing my experience... When people hear me tell the story, they often say, "Oh my goodness, I get it. I get it!" But it's not enough.

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.

Sometimes they're nothing, sometimes they're something, sometimes there's a connection that years later may show up. All of this information is useful.

Letters were first invented for consoling such solitary wretches as myself. Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing.

When I left home, my mum said "Don't forget to write", I thought, "That's unlikely"... It's a basic skill isn't it.

As usual, the note occupied less than a page and included neither salutation nor closing, Uncle Hal's opinion being that since the letter had a direction upon it, the intended recipient was obvious, the seal indicated plainly who had written it, and he did not waste his time in writing to fools.