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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
Read
Past
Book
Novels
Think
Narrative
Thinking
Conservative
Novel
Books
Written

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I'm not really a mass market writer.
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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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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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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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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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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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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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I invented the historical spy novel.
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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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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
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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 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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