Alan Furst Quotes
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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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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Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
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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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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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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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I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.
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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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When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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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For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.
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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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I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
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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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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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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'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
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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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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 knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.
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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.
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I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.