I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
ALAN FURSTOne is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
More Alan Furst Quotes
-
-
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
ALAN FURST -
You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
ALAN FURST -
I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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 -
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 -
Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
ALAN FURST -
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
ALAN FURST -
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
ALAN FURST -
The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.
ALAN FURST -
the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
ALAN FURST -
I’m not really a mass market writer.
ALAN FURST -
The best Paris I know now is in my head.
ALAN FURST -
Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
ALAN FURST -
I’m a genre writer.
ALAN FURST -
Good people don’t spend their time being good.
ALAN FURST -
I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
ALAN FURST -
I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
ALAN FURST -
I read very little contemporary anything.
ALAN FURST -
Live today, for tomorrow we die.
ALAN FURST -
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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 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’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
ALAN FURST -
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
ALAN FURST -
It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.
ALAN FURST -
If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
ALAN FURST