Amor Towles Quotes

As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

The success of 'Rome' was in making the history accessible and giving viewers everyman characters through which they can connect to historical figures. It stops the story from being too remote.

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.

When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.

Nothing in the reporting of a nation's history could so mislead the younger generation as to represent great events in such a way that they appear to have happened as a matter of course.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

It often disturbs me, when I see a film set in a historical time, that the people are too modern.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

History is more or less bunk.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.

Most filmmakers aren't very interested in history. They worry constantly that people will be bored.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Nothing is more difficult than to recreate in all its complexity than a distant age, and not only to get it right but make it seem fresh and relevant.

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.