I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
ALAN FURSTI invented the historical spy novel.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
ALAN FURST -
Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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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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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
ALAN FURST -
Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.
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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’m a genre writer.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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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.
ALAN FURST






