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
Two
Pages
Book
Research
Writing
Produce
Work
Months
Takes
Days
Start
Nine
Three
Gonna

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I don't inflict horrors on readers.
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If you're a writer, you're always working.
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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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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
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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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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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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 invented the historical spy novel.
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The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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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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You write a lot of books you hope you get better.
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I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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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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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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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
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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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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying
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