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The best Paris I know now is in my head.

Alan Furst

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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Paris
Head
Best

More quotes by Alan Furst

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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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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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The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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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 write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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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 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 can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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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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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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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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