Alan Furst Quotes
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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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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'm not really a mass market writer.
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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 had a publishing history of murder mysteries.
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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 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 knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
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When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.
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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 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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My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
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For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.