Alan Furst Quotes

I just became what I call an ‘anti-fascist novelist.’ There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they’re the same: they’re tyranny states.

When I went to prep school in New York City, I had to ride the subway and learned how to do homework on the train. I can work and read through anything.

I’ve evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story – my publisher, Random House, has urged that.

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn’t have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments – mainly murder mysteries.

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it’s high, it’s good – but it’s escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

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.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It’s just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don’t really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

Venice has always fascinated me. Every country in Europe then was run by kings and the Vatican except Venice, which was basically run by councils. I’ve always wondered why.

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don’t like to be deflected by acrobatics.

I don’t work Sunday any more… The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.

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.

For something that’s supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

I invented the historical spy novel.

I read very little contemporary anything.

I read very little contemporary anything… I don’t think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?

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.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn’t work that way.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation‘ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history – I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative – completely based on ‘The Conversation,’ the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like… Gene Hackman.

‘The Levanter’ features some of the strongest action scenes to be found in Ambler – who can, in some of his fiction, stay in one place for a whole novel.

If you’re a writer, you’re always working.

I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people.

If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they’re all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They’re disappointed, vengeful, angry.

My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she’d get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.

I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It’s an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.

Fast-paced from start to finish, ‘The Honourable Schoolboy‘ is fired by le Carre’s conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else‘s books.

I was raised on John D. MacDonald‘s Travis McGee series. Something about this genre – hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold – never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn’t much of an escape. That’s not always true, but I don’t read much contemporary fiction.

I love the combination of the words ‘spies‘ and ‘Balkans.’ It’s like meat and potatoes.

I’d never been in a police state. I didn’t know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.

I’ve always liked lost, old New York.

I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

I look for the dark story, where something secret was done. I read and read and pick up the trail of a true story. I use nothing but true stories. They are so much better than phony ones.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

For John le Carre, it was always who’s betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the ’30s, it’s a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.