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