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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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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Book
Novels
Think
Narrative
Thinking
Conservative
Novel
Books
Written
Read
Past

More quotes by 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.
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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 don't inflict horrors on readers.
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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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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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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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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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 read very little contemporary anything.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Alan Furst