Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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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I read very little contemporary anything.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I’m a genre writer.
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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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I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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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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The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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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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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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It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.
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I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
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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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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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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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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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