Alan Furst Quotes

Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.
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.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
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.
Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
Seattle's support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer.
Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
The 1930s was a funny time. People knew they might not live for another six months, so if they were attracted to one another, there was no time to dawdle.
The best Paris I know now is in my head.
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.
The idea that someone is going to write me, and I'm not going to answer - I was just raised not to do that. We are the result of our upbringing, and my upbringing was very much to meet obligations... You just didn't let things go.
The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don't think you would... I don't think anything different than you think - it was horrible.
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Alan Furst
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20 February, 1941
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