Alan Furst quotes

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should. (Alan Furst)

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

Alan Furst

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

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

I invented the historical spy novel.

Alan Furst

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

I read very little contemporary anything. (Alan Furst)

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.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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 Furst

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

Alan Furst

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

I'm not really a mass market writer.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

Alan Furst

Occupation: American Author
Born: February 20, 1941
Quotes count: 23

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