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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
Characters
Write
Tell
Character
Writing

More quotes by Alan Furst

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I invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
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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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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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If you're a writer, you're always working.
Alan Furst
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
Alan Furst
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
Alan Furst
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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
Alan Furst
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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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'm not really a mass market 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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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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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
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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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
Alan Furst