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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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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Tell
Character
Writing
Characters
Write

More quotes by Alan Furst

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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.
Alan Furst
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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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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
Alan Furst
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
Alan Furst
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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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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I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
Alan Furst
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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.
Alan Furst
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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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.
Alan Furst
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
Alan Furst
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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.
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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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.
Alan Furst
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
Alan Furst