I invented the historical spy novel.
ALAN FURSTI don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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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Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
ALAN FURST -
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.
ALAN FURST -
When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.
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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 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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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
ALAN FURST -
I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
ALAN FURST