Alan Furst Quotes
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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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I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
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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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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.
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I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
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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.
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Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
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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.
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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.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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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.
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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.
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A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.
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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.
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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.
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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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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?
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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.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
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I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
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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.