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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.

Alan Furst

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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Began
Western
Whether
Heart
Like
Civilisation
Beating
Ended
Paris

More quotes by 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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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 really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
Alan Furst
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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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.
Alan Furst
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
Alan Furst
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
Alan Furst
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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 write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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I'm not really a mass market 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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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst