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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
Thinking
Conservative
Novel
Books
Written
Read
Past
Book
Novels
Think
Narrative

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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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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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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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 don't inflict horrors on readers.
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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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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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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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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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I read very little contemporary anything.
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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 write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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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 can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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