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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
Writing
Engine
Really
Drives
Engines
Plot
Use
History
Write
Everything
Plots

More quotes by 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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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 invented the historical spy novel.
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
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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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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 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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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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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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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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