Alan Furst Quotes
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
Quotes to Explore
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No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
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Whatever you want to do in the industry, do it on the smallest level at first. If you want to be a writer, write a screenplay in your house. If you want to be an actor, put on a one-man show. If you want to be a stand-up comedian, go to an open mic.
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I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.
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The last time I had to make a career decision, I was 17. I could have gone to Ballet Theatre or National Ballet of Canada. There were options. But as I became exposed to the Robbins repertoire, I realized that there was a living genius in the house.
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I've always wanted to be an actress, ever since I was a little girl. I've always played the mom and I play my sister as the daughter. I wanted to be an actress on television and movies instead of just around the house.
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I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person's body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema.
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Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.
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What works for me is knowing the character in an emotional sense. I wish I was more logical but it doesn't work for me like that. I need quite a lot of time; it's why I always worry when I'm doing more than one thing at a time. I hope that some sort of magic will kick in.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that crisis lands like a thud on the Oval Office desk?
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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I really like boats. If you want to go somewhere, you just take your house with you.
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Well, my constituents are happy that the Republican Party has finally gotten off its duff, seeing that we do control the House and the Senate and the presidency, and taken up the issue of illegal immigration.
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I am truly at my happiest not when I am writing an aria for an actor or making a grand political or social point. I am at my happiest when I've figured out a fun way for somebody to slip on a banana peel.
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One day, I was at my grandmother's house, and I found diaries that she kept as a young girl. I opened one to a page that had flowers glued inside. In her childish handwriting, my grandmother wrote, 'Pap died today. I am very sad.' The fact that this was true and that I could see the withered flowers made a huge impression on me.
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I'm pretty much a dinosaur in the studio. I like things hand-drawn, even today. The story artists use Cintiqs, but I'm the only person who hasn't completely converted to computers. I like the Cintiq, but there's something about the raw emotional power of using paper and pencil.
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I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.
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For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
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Life's fulfillment finds constant obstacles in its path; but those are necessary for the sake of its advance. The stream is saved from the sluggishness of its current by the perpetual opposition of the soil through which it must cut its way. The spirit of fight belongs to the genius of life.
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My parents split before my fifth birthday, and I moved with Mom and my three siblings to her native Oahu.
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It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold.
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I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
