My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
ALAN FURSTGood 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.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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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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When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.
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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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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 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.
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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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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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Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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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.
ALAN FURST