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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.
Alan Furst -
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
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Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
Alan Furst -
I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.
Alan Furst -
I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states.
Alan Furst -
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 -
I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst -
I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
Alan Furst
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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 -
The best Paris I know now is in my head.
Alan Furst -
What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.
Alan Furst -
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 -
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 -
I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
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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 -
When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
Alan Furst -
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 -
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
Alan Furst -
A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.
Alan Furst -
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
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Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.
Alan Furst -
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
Alan Furst -
I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
Alan Furst -
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst