Alan Furst Quotes

'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.
A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.
Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.
Fast-paced from start to finish, 'The Honourable Schoolboy' is fired by le Carre's conviction regarding evil done and its consequences.
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.
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
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.
French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.
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.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.
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 basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.
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.
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
I don't work Sunday any more... The Sabbath is a very reasonable idea. Otherwise, you work yourself to death.
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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Alan Furst
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20 February, 1941
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