Top 100 Furst Quotes
#1. I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business
the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.
Vince Flynn
#2. Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.
P. J. O'Rourke
#3. I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.
Alan Furst
#4. Look for the heart of a tradition in the actions of its humble servants and selfless teachers. Listen and let the teachings be borne out, or set aside, based on your experience.
Andrew Furst
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. When you left this one theater in Norfolk, the actors had to walk through the lobby to get out to the street. People would see you and say nice things, tell you that you were good. So, pretty soon I'm pretending to forget things backstage, going through the lobby a couple of times.
Stephen Furst
#10. When you're looking for somebody and you find yourself in contact with people you've never met, you are getting close.
Alan Furst
#11. I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.
Alan Furst
#12. I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
Alan Furst
#13. For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
Alan Furst
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. When I auditioned for 'Animal House,' I had only done some plays at a local dinner theater in Virginia.
Stephen Furst
#19. When we meditate we are dancing with each moment. Just like the very first dance we remember: We are self-conscious, but eager. We hope for a connection, but we're cautious of intimacy.
Andrew Furst
#20. When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
Alan Furst
#21. 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
#22. Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
Alan Furst
#23. If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.
Alan Furst
#29. French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.
Alan Furst
#30. I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.
Alan Furst
#31. I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
Alan Furst
#32. '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
#33. 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
#34. I had a great childhood, a very close-knit family. We were all overweight, and we had good times eating together, I imagine.
Stephen Furst
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I've become a representative of the American Diabetes Association, and then I just became national spokesman for the American Heart Association for a campaign called The Heart of Diabetes, which brings the awareness of cardio-vascular disease to diabetics.
Stephen Furst
#38. Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
Alan Furst
#39. 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
#40. Indeed, there is something to learn from the openness of children. The immediacy of their pleasure and their emotional authenticity reveals a certain purity that's lacking in adults.
Andrew Furst
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Alan Furst
#46. If we are looking to employ logic to infer a deity, we fall into absurdity.
Andrew Furst
#47. I'll make a diet cheesecake, but I'll put it in a Sara Lee box. Or I'll have a huge bowl of pasta, but it's actually just a cup of pasta - the rest is vegetables. It makes me feel less deprived.
Stephen Furst
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I didn't get a Bachelor's degree - I got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, which means I didn't have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times.
Stephen Furst
#51. 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
#52. I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
Alan Furst
#53. 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
#54. I don't work Sunday any more ... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
Alan Furst
#55. 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
#56. The first time I ever did a play, in junior high school, I said to myself, 'Hey, people like me doing this. I'm making them laugh.'
Stephen Furst
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I'm one of the most insecure people in the world, always have been, and when you're a fat kid, you try to make the fat jokes before other people make them.
Stephen Furst
#60. Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
Alan Furst
#61. I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.
Alan Furst
#62. 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
#63. When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,' Renata
Alan Furst
#64. Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
Alan Furst
#65. I went to high school in Virginia Beach, Va., and we had these guys - they were surfers. They didn't like me, never talked to me. And if they didn't like you, they threw toothpicks at you. After I did a play, it was different. I found out I was pretty good at something.
Stephen Furst
#66. Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.
Alan Furst
#67. Like most severely overweight people, I had to hit a rock-hard bottom before I'd take responsibility for the consequences of neglecting my own health.
Stephen Furst
#68. Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
Alan Furst
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst
#72. 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
#73. You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
Alan Furst
#74. You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
Alan Furst
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
#78. I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
Alan Furst
#79. People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
Alan Furst
#80. There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life.
Alan Furst
#81. Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
Alan Furst
#82. When we sit in meditation, we are closer than usual to the world as it is. By simply bringing body, breath, and mind together in the present moment, we touch Buddha; we touch reality, and we are in the world as it is. Most people's experience in this state is peaceful and rejuvenating.
Andrew Furst
#83. If you're a writer, you're always working.
Alan Furst
#84. 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
#85. I finally admitted that obesity and diabetes were part of a life-threatening legacy - and I had to deal with that reality or die.
Stephen Furst
#86. I remember I made $22 a week doing dinner theater in Norfolk, Virginia. Back then, in the '70s, that was pretty good for a teenager, for a part-time job.
Stephen Furst
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. I'm not really a mass market writer.
Alan Furst
#92. Enlightenment, the great mysterious state of mind, is contentment, or freedom from suffering. How then do we measure happiness? We measure it in smiles, in the openness of our hearts, in generosity, in gratitude and compassion towards others, and in the steadiness of our contentment.
Andrew Furst
#93. 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
#94. I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst
#95. You can eat a lot more vegetables than you can cotton candy. Bring on the veggies. Stay away from the fluffy carbs.
Stephen Furst
#96. No one can hurt you if you know what's real and what isn't.
Joshua Furst
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. One of the key things I did to stay on my diet is I never allowed myself to get hungry. As soon as I got hungry, I'd eat healthy foods.
Stephen Furst
#100. Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
Alan Furst
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