The Amateur Quotes

“The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur

“His central thesis, if I understood him correctly, was the essential absence of subtlety in all language. The acid test—which none of the fourteen languages he spoke fluently, or the twelve others he could read, met—seemed to be whether it had words to differentiate between the love of someone for, say, a mother, a brother, a friend, a sexual partner, a dog, a flower, love of life, love that consisted mostly of physical desire, love that was made up of patience and habit, puppy loves, first loves, second loves, and so on and so forth.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur

“He was a curious man who nourished himself with words; he was like a drug addict getting his daily fix. At the same time, he was aware of the dangers of words. He often said that speech organized behavior, and not the other way around. He thought clichés were wilted, tired poems. He complained that the world had been over-described; that often what we saw was the description, not the reality.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur

“Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.”
― Robert Littell, The Amateur