Alan Furst Quotes
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
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I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
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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 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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For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
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I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.
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I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
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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.
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I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.
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In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.
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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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The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don't think you would... I don't think anything different than you think - it was horrible.
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When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
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I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
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The idea that someone is going to write me, and I'm not going to answer - I was just raised not to do that. We are the result of our upbringing, and my upbringing was very much to meet obligations... You just didn't let things go.
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For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
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If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry.