Live today, for tomorrow we die.
ALAN FURSTWherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
More Alan Furst Quotes
-
-
Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
ALAN FURST -
On the Greek frontier, one wasn’t sure what came next. So, don’t trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.
ALAN FURST -
One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
ALAN FURST -
I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
ALAN FURST -
The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.
ALAN FURST -
I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
ALAN FURST -
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
ALAN FURST -
When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.
ALAN FURST -
I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
ALAN FURST -
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
ALAN FURST -
If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
ALAN FURST -
I invented the historical spy novel.
ALAN FURST -
the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
ALAN FURST -
I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
ALAN FURST -
Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.
ALAN FURST -
Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.
ALAN FURST -
Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
ALAN FURST -
I’m not really a mass market writer.
ALAN FURST -
I read very little contemporary anything.
ALAN FURST -
It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.
ALAN FURST -
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
ALAN FURST -
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
ALAN FURST -
Good people don’t spend their time being good.
ALAN FURST -
I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
ALAN FURST -
Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
ALAN FURST -
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
ALAN FURST