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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
Write
Everything
Plots
Writing
Engine
Really
Drives
Engines
Plot
Use
History

More quotes by 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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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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 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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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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.
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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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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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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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I invented the historical spy novel.
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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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