Alan Furst Quotes
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'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.
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I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.
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I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.
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People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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.
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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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.
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
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Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
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I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
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Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.