Alan Furst Quotes & Sayings

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

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

A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano. — Alan Furst

They had refused payment, their spying was an act of conscience. Sincere Christians, German Lutherans, they had watched with horror as the Nazis violated every precept sacred to them. .... They didn't care to be paid. They had prayed together for hours, they explained, down on their knees, trying to make this decision, but now it was made. The people who led Germany were evil, and they were obliged, by their faith, to act against them. — Alan Furst

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

He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that's what it took. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

Well, he thought, one did what one had to do, so life went. No, one did what one had to do in order to do what one wanted to do - so life really went. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people. — Alan Furst

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

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

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. — Alan Furst

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

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries. — Alan Furst

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

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

With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

They drove on, through pretty Schwabisch villages. Every one of them had its Christbaum, a tall evergreen in the center of town, with candles lit as darkness fell, and a star on top. There were also candles in every window, and red-berried holly weaths hung on the doors. By the side of the road, at the entry to each village, stood a sign attacking the Jews. This was, Mercier thought, a kind of competition, for none of the signs were the same. Juden dirfen nicht bleiben - 'Jews must not stay here' - was followed by Wer die Juden unterstuzt fordert den Kommunissmus, 'Who helps the Jews helps communism,' then the dramatic 'This flat-footed stranger, with kinky hair and hooked nose, he shall not our land enjoy, he must leave, he must leave. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

I don't inflict horrors on readers. — 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

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be. — Alan Furst

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

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel. — Alan Furst

The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved. — Alan Furst

'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. — Alan Furst

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

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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

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

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

Spying came to him as making love comes to other men. It is his belief, in fact, that his father may have had relations with the Okhrana, the czar's intelligence service, though his murder by the Turks was haphazard - simply one act in a village slaughter. But Avram knew them, whether they were Turkish Aghas or British officers, he always understood how they worked, where their vulnerabilities lay. — Alan Furst

The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

I've always liked lost, old New York. — 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

The best Paris I know now is in my head. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

I read very little contemporary anything. — Alan Furst

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

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. — 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

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. — Alan Furst

Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

crossed borders like the wind. Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer. — Alan Furst

I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life. — Alan Furst

Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

When a diplomat says 'yes' he means 'maybe.' When a diplomat says 'maybe' he means 'no.' But if a diplomat says 'no' he's no diplomat. — 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

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. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

When you're looking for somebody and you find yourself in contact with people you've never met, you are getting close. — Alan Furst

It made her - a bizarre trick - long for a past that was still in the future. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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

pajamas. He stumbled a little, the two men jerked him upright and his glasses went askew. They stopped at the back of the Stolypin car, and one of the men let him go in order to open the door. Instinctively, he adjusted his glasses. Turned his head. For a bare instant, he stared at Khristo. His face appeared to have somehow shrunk, and his eyes looked enormous. Then the two — Alan Furst

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

At least, he thought, looking down at his feet, his socks were still in decent shape. It was the socks that went first. A whore he knew said that she only took customers whose socks were in good condition. One of Casson's fellow lodgers showed him how he used a pen to color in the skin that showed white in the holes. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren't all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

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

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. — Alan Furst

The earth is four-fifths water, that's a lot of room to hide, so the great trick of naval warfare has always been to find the enemy before he finds you. You're finished, if you can't do that, and all the courage and sacrifice in the world simply adds up to a lost war. — Alan Furst

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. — Alan Furst