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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
It was dawn by the time the detective showed up; tired and weary. Tired because he'd been called from his bed before dawn, weary because he'd spent his life looking at the bad side of human nature and that wasn't going to change. -- 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
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
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
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
Live today, for tomorrow we die. -- Alan Furst
I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place. -- Alan Furst
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy. -- Alan Furst
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way. -- 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
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
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
French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is. -- Alan Furst
European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations. -- Alan Furst
I don't work Sunday any more ... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death. -- 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
I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist. -- 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
I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript. -- 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
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
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
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
Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. -- 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
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
I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books. -- 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
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 best Paris I know now is in my head. -- 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
'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
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
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better. -- Alan Furst
I had a publishing history of murder mysteries. -- 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
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington. -- Alan Furst
One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be. -- 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
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
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
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. -- Alan Furst
I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside. -- 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
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
It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter. -- Alan Furst
A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know. -- Alan Furst
The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it. -- Alan Furst
It made her - a bizarre trick - long for a past that was still in the future. -- 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
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
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, 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. -- Alan Furst
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. -- 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
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
When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,' Renata -- Alan Furst
A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano. -- 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
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything. -- 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
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books. -- 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
when at last they'd had to admit to themselves that they'd made all the love they could, had been a last meal. Like -- 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 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 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
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
Fascism is a revolutionary force, it wants to destroy the established order and take its place - take its money, its businesses, everything it has because, to these people, the governing class in Europe is hesitant, ineffective, effete. So, destroy it. -- Alan Furst
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer. -- 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
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. -- Alan Furst
Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners. -- 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
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
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should. -- 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
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 chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II. -- 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
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. -- Alan Furst
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. -- 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
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
If you're a writer, you're always working. -- Alan Furst
A moment comes, and if you wish to look at yourself as human, you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune. -- Alan Furst
This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs. -- 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 can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic. -- Alan Furst
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt. -- Alan Furst
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way. -- 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 love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people. -- Alan Furst
When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality. -- 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've always liked lost, old New York. -- Alan Furst
People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it. -- Alan Furst
Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that? -- 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
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right. -- 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
With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines. -- 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
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
I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated. -- Alan Furst
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that. -- 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
I invented the historical spy novel. -- Alan Furst
Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying -- Alan Furst
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years. -- Alan Furst
You have to have heart's passion to write a novel. -- Alan Furst
... as I said; the Nazi party was built on ruined lives - a failed career, the bitterness that feeds on injustice, redemption promised by a radical political movement. -- Alan Furst
He'd grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding, and prayed for those he'd lost, for those he loved, and an end to evil in the world. -- Alan Furst
I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write. -- 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
Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel. -- 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
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them. -- Alan Furst
I read very little contemporary anything. -- Alan Furst
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. -- 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 think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel. -- Alan Furst
I don't inflict horrors on readers. -- Alan Furst
I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes. -- 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
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. -- Alan Furst