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 FURSTOnce you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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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 grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
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You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.
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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.
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The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.
ALAN FURST