When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.
ALAN FURSTWherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
More Alan Furst Quotes
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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’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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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 write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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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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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
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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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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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.
ALAN FURST