You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
ALAN FURSTWhether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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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 expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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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 expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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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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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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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I’m not really a mass market writer.
ALAN FURST