Quote

Good people don't spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.

Alan Furst

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TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
People
Lawns
Dog
Spend
Playing
Good
Time
Think
Mowing
Thinking
Lawn

More quotes by Alan Furst

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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.
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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.
Alan Furst
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
Alan Furst
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst
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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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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.
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I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
Alan Furst
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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.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
Alan Furst
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Alan Furst