Alan Furst Quotes

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

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

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

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

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

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.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

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

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

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

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I invented the historical spy novel.

I read very little contemporary anything.

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

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

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.

I don't inflict horrors on readers.

I'm not really a mass market writer.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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