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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

Alan Furst

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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Everything
Plots
Writing
Engine
Really
Drives
Engines
Plot
Use
History
Write

More quotes by Alan Furst

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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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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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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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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'm not really a mass market writer.
Alan Furst
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
Alan Furst
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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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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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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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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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.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
Alan Furst
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I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst