Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Furst

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Alan Furst.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Alan Furst is an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944.

American - Author | Born: February 20, 1941

Source: Wikipedia

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

I like to say I sit alone in my room, and I fight the language. I am wildly obsessive. I can't let something go if I think it's wrong.

Alan Furst

I read very little contemporary anything.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

What you get in the Cold War is 'the wilderness of mirrors' where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carre, but not me.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.

Alan Furst

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

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

I'm not really a mass market writer.

Alan Furst

When I read period material - and it ain't on Google - I am always alert for that one incredible detail. I'll read a whole book and get three words out of it, but they'll be three really good words.

Alan Furst

You could be a victim, you could be a hero, you could be a villain, or you could be a fugitive. But you could not just stand by. If you were in Europe between 1933 and 1945, you had to be something.

Alan Furst

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

Alan Furst

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

I invented the historical spy novel.

Alan Furst

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

Alan Furst

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

Alan Furst

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

Alan Furst

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

Alan Furst

Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

Alan Furst

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.

Alan Furst

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

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

Alan Furst

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

Alan Furst

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

Alan Furst

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

Alan Furst

Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Furst

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