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.
ALAN FURSTthe fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
More Alan Furst Quotes
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I’m a genre writer.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book.
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Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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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 don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish 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 grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
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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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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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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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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.
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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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When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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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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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