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I invented the historical spy novel.

Alan Furst

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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Spy
Invented
Historical
Novel

More quotes by Alan Furst

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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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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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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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 write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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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.
Alan Furst
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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
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst
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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
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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.
Alan Furst
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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
Alan Furst
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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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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.
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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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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
Alan Furst
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
Alan Furst