Top 100 Alan Furst Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
Alan Furst
#4. You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
Alan Furst
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
Alan Furst
#8. Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.
Alan Furst
#9. I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
Alan Furst
#10. Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
Alan Furst
#11. When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,' Renata
Alan Furst
#12. I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.
Alan Furst
#13. Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
Alan Furst
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I don't work Sunday any more ... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
Alan Furst
#18. 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
#19. Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
Alan Furst
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst
#23. 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
#24. I'm not really a mass market writer.
Alan Furst
#25. 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
#26. I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. If you're a writer, you're always working.
Alan Furst
#31. Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
Alan Furst
#32. People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
Alan Furst
#33. I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
Alan Furst
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst
#38. Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
Alan Furst
#39. 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
#40. When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
Alan Furst
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
Alan Furst
#45. I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
Alan Furst
#46. When you're looking for somebody and you find yourself in contact with people you've never met, you are getting close.
Alan Furst
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Alan Furst
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.
Alan Furst
#55. 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
#56. Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
Alan Furst
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. '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
#61. I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
Alan Furst
#62. I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.
Alan Furst
#63. French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.
Alan Furst
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
Alan Furst
#67. ... 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
#68. Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
Alan Furst
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The best Paris I know now is in my head.
Alan Furst
#73. I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.
Alan Furst
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.
Alan Furst
#83. I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
Alan Furst
#84. 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
#85. A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano.
Alan Furst
#86. 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
#87. The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it.
Alan Furst
#88. One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
Alan Furst
#89. A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.
Alan Furst
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
Alan Furst
#96. 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
#97. Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
Alan Furst
#98. 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
#99. It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter.
Alan Furst
#100. 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
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