I invented the historical spy novel.
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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You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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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 grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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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’m a genre writer.
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Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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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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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.
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I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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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.
ALAN FURST






