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.
ALAN FURSTAnd, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
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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 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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I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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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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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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