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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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If you're a writer, you're always working.
Alan Furst
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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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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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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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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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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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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.
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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 read very little contemporary anything.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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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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'm not really a mass market writer.
Alan Furst