The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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 expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
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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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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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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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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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I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
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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 fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
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I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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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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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 don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
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