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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
Writing
Characters
Write
Tell
Character

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.
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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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 really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Alan Furst
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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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 don't inflict horrors on readers.
Alan Furst
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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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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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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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 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 invented the historical spy novel.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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
Alan Furst
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
Alan Furst