You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
ALAN FURSTI 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.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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.
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I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
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I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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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.
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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
ALAN FURST