Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
ALAN FURSTIf you’re a writer, you’re always working.
More Alan Furst Quotes
-
-
the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
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 -
Good people don’t spend their time being good.
ALAN FURST -
I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.
ALAN FURST -
I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
ALAN FURST -
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
ALAN FURST -
I’m not really a mass market writer.
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 -
I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
ALAN FURST -
Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
ALAN FURST -
You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
ALAN FURST -
I’m a genre writer.
ALAN FURST -
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
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 -
The best Paris I know now is in my head.
ALAN FURST