Alan Furst Quotes

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Last Updated on May 30, 2021

Head
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Nov 07, 2020

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

Past
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Nov 07, 2020

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

Make
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Get
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Nov 07, 2020

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

Invented
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Nov 07, 2020

I invented the historical spy novel.

Never
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Everything
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Maybe
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Nov 07, 2020

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

Nov 07, 2020

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

Graham
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Nov 07, 2020

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

Little
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Nov 07, 2020

I read very little contemporary anything.

Back
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Nov 07, 2020

I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.

Mass
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Nov 07, 2020

I'm not really a mass market writer.

Nov 07, 2020

If you're a writer, you're always working.

Tell
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Call
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Nov 07, 2020

I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.

Language
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Nov 07, 2020

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

Like
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Good
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Nov 07, 2020

Good people don't spend their time being good. 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.

Nov 07, 2020

The idea that someone is going to write me, and I'm not going to answer - I was just raised not to do that. We are the result of our upbringing, and my upbringing was very much to meet obligations... You just didn't let things go.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

Makeup
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Nov 07, 2020

My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.

Nov 07, 2020

I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.

Nov 07, 2020

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

Character
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Nov 07, 2020

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like... Gene Hackman.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

Control
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Nov 07, 2020

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

Cold War
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Nov 07, 2020

Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.

Just
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Nov 07, 2020

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.

Good
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Nov 07, 2020

When I read period material - and it ain't on Google - I am always alert for that one incredible detail. I'll read a whole book and get three words out of it, but they'll be three really good words.

Different
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Nov 07, 2020

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

City
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Nov 07, 2020

I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.

Learning
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Nov 07, 2020

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

Brain
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Nov 07, 2020

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

Mean
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Nov 07, 2020

I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states.

Passion
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Nov 07, 2020

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

Good
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Nov 07, 2020

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

Good
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Nov 07, 2020

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

Know
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Nov 07, 2020

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

Good Thing
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Nov 07, 2020

Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.

History
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Nov 07, 2020

If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry.

Love
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Nov 07, 2020

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

History
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Nov 07, 2020

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Nov 07, 2020

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

Five
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Nov 07, 2020

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

Myself
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Nov 07, 2020

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

Nov 07, 2020

My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.

Books
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Nov 07, 2020

I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.

Never
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Nov 07, 2020

I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.

Good
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Nov 07, 2020

Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.

Beginning
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Nov 07, 2020

I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.

Music
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Nov 07, 2020

For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.

My Own
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Nov 07, 2020

I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.

Darkness
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Nov 07, 2020

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

Life
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Nov 07, 2020

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

Live
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Nov 07, 2020

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Paris
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Nov 07, 2020

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

More
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Nov 07, 2020

I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.

Feel
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Nov 07, 2020

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.

Live
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Nov 07, 2020

The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle.

Intelligence
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Nov 07, 2020

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

My Life
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Nov 07, 2020

I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.

Nov 07, 2020

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

Nov 07, 2020

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.

Mother
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Nov 07, 2020

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

Never
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Nov 07, 2020

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Culture
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Nov 07, 2020

Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.

Man
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Nov 07, 2020

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

Morning
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Nov 07, 2020

We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.

People
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Nov 07, 2020

I read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?

Like
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Nov 07, 2020

I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.

Man
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Nov 07, 2020

I figured I would always be a candidate for man of the year in the virtue-is-its-own-reward category. What that did was force me to concentrate on the work.

Experience
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Nov 07, 2020

I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened - this is just what I do in my life.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

Seattle's support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer.

Love
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Nov 07, 2020

I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.

Think
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Nov 07, 2020

The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don't think you would... I don't think anything different than you think - it was horrible.

Man
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Nov 07, 2020

Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.

Place
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Nov 07, 2020

'The Levanter' features some of the strongest action scenes to be found in Ambler - who can, in some of his fiction, stay in one place for a whole novel.

Done
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Nov 07, 2020

Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.

Dark
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Nov 07, 2020

I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.

Know
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Nov 07, 2020

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.

Fight
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Nov 07, 2020

I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.

Lost
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Nov 07, 2020

I've always liked lost, old New York.

Cold War
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Nov 07, 2020

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

Good
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Nov 07, 2020

For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

Nov 07, 2020

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.

Down
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Nov 07, 2020

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

People
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Nov 07, 2020

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

Country
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Nov 07, 2020

Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I've always wondered why.

My Life
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Nov 07, 2020

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

British
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Nov 07, 2020

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

New
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Nov 07, 2020

When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.

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