Alan Furst Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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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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 love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.
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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 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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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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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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Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.
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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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Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
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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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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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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'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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My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.