Quote

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

Alan Furst

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Nerve
Nerves
Pretend

More quotes by Alan Furst

Image
I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
Alan Furst
Image
Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
Alan Furst
Image
You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
Alan Furst
Image
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst
Image
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst
Image
If you're a writer, you're always working.
Alan Furst
Image
The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
Alan Furst
Image
I have a very serious censorship office inside my head it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain.
Alan Furst
Image
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
Alan Furst
Image
Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
Alan Furst
Image
You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
Alan Furst
Image
The best Paris I know now is in my head.
Alan Furst
Image
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Alan Furst
Image
I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst
Image
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
Alan Furst
Image
Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
Alan Furst
Image
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
Alan Furst
Image
Live today, for tomorrow we die.
Alan Furst
Image
I'm not really a mass market writer.
Alan Furst
Image
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.
Alan Furst