Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Furst - Page 2

'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.

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.

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

I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

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.

For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.

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.

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.

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

I've always liked lost, old New York.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

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.

I had the experience of a monk copying documents, applying myself assiduously to my work. And I thought whatever happened, happened - this is just what I do in my life.

I figured I would always be a candidate for man of the year in the virtue-is-its-own-reward category. What that did was force me to concentrate on the work.

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?

We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.

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

Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

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

I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.

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

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

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.

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 think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.

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.

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.

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

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

I don't inflict horrors on readers.

Live today, for tomorrow we die.

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.