Good people don’t spend their time being good.
ALAN FURSTGood people don’t spend their time being good.
ALAN FURSTI 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 FURSTOn 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 FURSTShowing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
ALAN FURSTI grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
ALAN FURSTAnd, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
ALAN FURSTI expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
ALAN FURSTI expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
ALAN FURSTI 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 FURSTWhether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.
ALAN FURSTI don’t inflict horrors on readers.
ALAN FURSTI invented the historical spy novel.
ALAN FURSTYou can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
ALAN FURSTI’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
ALAN FURSTI don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
ALAN FURSTLive today, for tomorrow we die.
ALAN FURST