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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
Whether
Heart
Like
Civilisation
Beating
Ended
Paris
Began
Western

More quotes by 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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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 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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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
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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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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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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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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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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 inflict horrors on readers.
Alan Furst
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Alan Furst