Quote

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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Alan Furst
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Three
Gonna
Two
Pages
Book
Research
Writing
Produce
Work
Months
Takes
Days
Start
Nine

More quotes by Alan Furst

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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
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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.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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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.
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.
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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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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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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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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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If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
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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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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
Alan Furst
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I read very little contemporary anything.
Alan Furst