Alan Furst Quotes
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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.
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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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We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
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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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You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.
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You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.
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I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
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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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I've always liked lost, old New York.
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My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.
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I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened - this is just what I do in my life.
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French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.
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I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
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If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
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Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.
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Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I've always wondered why.
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Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
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I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
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I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.
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The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle.
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I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.
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Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.