“I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.”

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I’m a genre writer.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said

I don’t inflict horrors on readers.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.

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.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.

Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.

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.

When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.

The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.

And when it’s sold to 50 countries or whatever, for me it’s a great deal. I make movies for an audience so if that audience grows, I feel really honoured and thankful for it.

I would love to work in international movies just because the talent all around the world is great.

There’s a lot of good talent and the audience base is bigger.

It’s basically how I choose movie roles. Would I like to see this movie? Is this movie important? Why would I do this? And Headhunters is a movie that I would like to see in the cinema.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.

We’ve never written a song and thought ‘oh it’d be great if in this part this happened in the audience’.

We don’t play to be seen. I’m addicted to music, not audiences.

In the South, it is different, they have a audience that is literate.